A Thousand Curves

Paul Nemser grew up in Portland, Oregon, where he fell in love with poetry while reading in the storage room in back of his family's tool store. He received an AB from Harvard College where he studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts where he studied with Stanley Kunitz and many others. When he asked Kunitz how he could survive as a poet in America, Kunitz gazed up at the sky and, after a long silence, answered, The Law. Three years later, Nemser attended Boston University School of Law and then practiced law for forty years. His love of poetry has never stopped. Nemser's book Taurus won the 2011 New American Poetry Prize from New American Press. His chapbook Tales of the Tetragrammaton was published by Mayapple Press. A Thousand Curves first appeared in 2021 from Red Mountain Press, where it received the Editor's Choice Award. Nemser's poems appear widely in magazines, including AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, London Review of Books, The Missouri Review, and Plume. The UK Poetry Society commissioned a short film of his poem After the Cal, which appears on the Society's website. Nemser was a co-translator of two books of Ukrainian poetry: BI Antonych, Square of Angels (Ardis 1977) and I Drach, Orchard Lamps (Sheep Meadow 1978). He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harborside, Maine.