Anne Boyer was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1973. She is the author of The Romance of Happy Workers, Selected Dreams with a Note on Phrenology, and Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse. Her work has appeared in The Poker, Denver Quarterly, The Canary, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals.

Boyer earned an M.F.A. degree in creative writing in 1997 from Wichita State University and a B.A. degree in English literature in 1996 from Kansas State University.

Before coming to the Kansas City Art Institute, she taught creative writing and literature in the English department at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Boyer has been teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute since 2007.

Boyer now lives in Overland Park, Kansas, where she edits the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln with K. Silem Mohammad.

Poetry:

• Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse (Effing Press, 2006)
  
• Selected Dreams with a note on Phrenology (2007)
  
• The Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House Press, 2008)
  
• Art is War (2008)
  
• Ma Vie en Bling (2006-2008)
  
• The 2000s (2009)
  
• My Common Heart (2011)
  
• Garments Against Women (Ahsahta Press, 2015/Mute, 2016)

Prose:

• On Julia Margaret Cameron's Photograph of her Grandchild, Archie (SFMOMA's Open Space)
  
• On Willie Nelson (The Rumpus)
  
• On Occupied Kansas City (Lana Turner)
  
• On when I was a single mother who worked three jobs (the Poetic Labor Project)
  
• On Being a Feminist Poet (Delirious Hem)
  
• On a Provisional Avant-Garde ( HTML Giant)
  
• Also,a mostly abandoned poetry book review blog

Poetry:

The place Where in the End/We find our happiness (the Academy of American Poets)

Audio:

The Young Men Are Glistening

Return to Top of Page

In A Torrent Virgin Plain

1.

To see you naked Kansas
winter lawn mowing

withholding from the Shaman King
episode lists
how to cook a rapist
in a northwest church
Fresno of electric blue

headlands oceans
dried up just like that

to be witnessed in the privates
of my country

distinguishing the language
the very simple language

dismantling
the natural in others

and that she has chosen
the book originally to have been called
A Completely Different Person

new values sort of unhappily inhabiting aesthetics
generated from the emergence of terrorism
to console and redeem

secondly
outlier repair
hosiery Sherwood Anderson
paxil frat fuck

the Left cannot talk

2.

Kansas your ancestor was out in the woods hunting
when one of them redneck grabs his logic

then I would laugh every time I heard
nearly every Mennonite
canard:

Kansas—
stupid fucking rednecks—
they do not believe in science (which is evolution)—
then they in Kansas is everything hick—

how many dogs do you got under the porch?
they tend to be slick, sophisticated, and free

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

phyla are body plans
the rivers of Kansas will be safe from the godless
after six months of dormancy

they prefer to be known as physicists
of course they fall

where anti-God
where apes
where the flat
done froze our brains

Anne's Webpage

Kansas City Art Institue: Creative Writing

Locuspoint

Poetry Foundation

Return to Top of Page