Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak is a collection that simultaneously sings and jolts with poems that lithely move from exterior to the interior life of middle-class America. On these pages, we meet the best and worst America offers–its traditions, its heroes, and its enemies–and we are charged with understanding each one in a more complex light. As in the ending of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus in which “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” this work masterfully finds hope in whatever dark beauty American culture offers.” -Airea D. Matthews
Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak is a collection that simultaneously sings and jolts with poems that lithely move from exterior to the interior life of middle-class America. On these pages, we meet the best and worst America offers–its traditions, its heroes, and its enemies–and we are charged with understanding each one in a more complex light. As in the ending of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus in which “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” this work masterfully finds hope in whatever dark beauty American culture offers.” -Airea D. Matthews
“Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak is a collection that simultaneously sings and jolts with poems that lithely move from the exterior to the interior life of middle-class America. On these pages, we meet the best and worst America offers—its traditions, its heroes, and its enemies—and we are charged with understanding each in a more complex light. As in the ending of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus in which “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” this work masterfully finds hope in whatever dark beauty American culture offers.”
—Airea D. Matthews
Dorian Elizabeth Knapp grew up in Houston and has lived in Massachusetts, California, Michigan, and Maryland, with brief stints in London and Prague. She earned a B.A. from Amherst College, an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. Her first book of poems, The Spite House, won the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize and was published by C&R Press in 2011. Her second collection, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak, won the 2019 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize and was published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2019. Her third collection, Causa Sui, won the 8th Annual Three Mile Harbor Book Award and was published by Three Mile Harbor Press in 2025. Her other honors include the 2022 Atlanta Review International Poetry Award, the 2018 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a 2017 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Sun. She is the founding director of the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Hood College and lives in Frederick, Maryland with her husband, the novelist Robert Eversz, and their two children.