Brian Blanchfield is the author of two books of poems, Not Even Then (University of California Press, 2004) and A Several World (Nightboat Books, 2014), which was the recipient of the 2014 James Laughlin Award. His third book is prose, Proxies, a collection of essays part cultural close reading and part dicey autobiography forthcoming from Nightboat in early 2016. His work has recently appeared in BOMB, Harper's, The Nation, Brick, The Brooklyn Rail, Guernica, Lana Turner, and other publications. The recipient of a 2015 Howard Foundation fellowship, he is an editor of Fence, a guest editor of the PEN Poetry Series, and the host and creator of Speedway and Swan, a poetry and music radio show on KXCI in Tucson.

HERE/YOU ARE

The Understory

By BRIAN BLANCHFIELD

“The understory is the second, subsidiary layer of growth in a forest”