Amy Dryansky’s alter ego is the perennial late bloomer, Pokey Mama.
I have two poetry collections: How I Got Lost So Close to Home & Grass Whistle.

Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry, Ireland) received the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. How I Got Lost So Close to Home, won the New England/New York Award from Alice James. Individual poems are included in several anthologies and journals, including Barrow Street, Harvard Review, New England Review, Memorious, Orion, The Sun, Tin House and The Women’s Review of Books. I’ve been awarded two poetry fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and I’m the former poet laureate for the city of Northampton, MA. In addition to my life as a poet, I have two kids and work full-time for a land conservation non-profit.

Ideas about nature figure largely in my work, as do ideas about seeing and being seen. Where do we stand in relation to nature? How (why) do we imagine ourselves as separate from the world we live in, that made, sustains and challenges us,  and from the miraculous and diverse communities that make up our world–natural and human? That supposed separation is a boundary I work to ignore, or at least imagine as porous and lush with possibility.

The conditions of caregiving, parenting and working also have a significant place in my poetry. After my kids were born and I was suffering from terrible writer’s block, I was able to spend a year as an Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center. My research project was to look at the impact of motherhood on women poets, i.e., think about why I couldn’t write anymore. It was a lifesaver, and not just because I got to be alone a few hours a week in my tiny, clean, empty office. (Though that was awesome.)

While at the FCWSRC I started a blog, Pokey Mama, which you can read here, to explore the experience of trying to understand and integrate the experiences of mother and poet. I wrote Pokey Mama for me, but also for the many, many women out there struggling to wrap their minds around their reality as artist AND…

More recently, I cared for my partner after he was diagnosed with ALS, shortly before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. That experience, and his eventual passing, is held in my body, and I’m still exploring its impacts. But I hope soon to write more about it, and to invite others to share their caregiving experiences through a creative workshop format. 

I’m still working and writing, and struggling with both, even as I love what I do. Pokey Mama is for you, if any of this sounds like you. I hope it helps.