Wiese, Anne Pierson

PERSONAL:

Born in Minneapolis, MN. Education: Received degrees from Amherst College and New York University Graduate Writing Workshop.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY.

CAREER:

Poet.

AWARDS, HONORS:

First-Place Poetry Prize, Writers@Work fellowship competition, 2002; "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Contest winner, 2004; second prize, Arvon International Poetry Competition, Arvon Foundation, 2004; New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry, 2005; Walt Whitman Award, 2006, for Floating City: Poems.

WRITINGS:

Floating City: Poems, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2007.

Contributor to anthologies, including Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2006. Contributor of poetry to journals, including Nation, Prairie Schooner, Raritan, Atlanta Review, Southwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Rattapallax, Carolina Quarterly, South Carolina Review, West Branch, and Hawai'i Pacific Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Anne Pierson Wiese received the 2006 Walt Whitman Award for her first collection of poetry, Floating City: Poems. "She lives in Brooklyn," explained Lisa Chamberlain in a review for Polis, "and her poetry so absolutely captures the essence of life in the city—the small moments of beauty and tragedy, how the natural and the built environments can combine to create magic." "Weise," Patricia Monaghan wrote in her Booklist review of the collection, "leaps across conventional divides and shows us urban life's complexity."

Wiese's work evokes comparisons with the opus of the English Romantic writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. "It's easy to discern," stated Douglas Basford in Unsplendid: An Online Journal of Poetry in Received and Nonce Forms, "that Words-worth is the governing ghost (confirmed in a later sonnet, ‘Composed upon Brooklyn Bridge, July 6, 2003’), primarily in that Wiese always endeavors to ‘look steadily upon [her] subject.’" "She delights as much in Chinese restaurant employees washing down tables with tea between lunch and dinner," Basford continued, "… as she does in New York's green spaces, being more than a mere denizen but an aficionado of the parks. She's profoundly aware of Nature as an impenetrable, indestructible element, capable of overwhelming the imagination, much in the way that Wordsworth was." Wiese, Basford concluded, is a "promising [voice] asserting the viability of received forms."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 2007, Patricia Monaghan, review of Floating City: Poems, p. 55.

ONLINE

Louisiana State University Press,http://www.lsu.edu/ (October 9, 2007).

Nation,http://www.thenation.com/ (October 9, 2007), "Happy 30th Anniversary Discovery/The Nation."

Polis,http://polisnyc.wordpress.com/ (October 9, 2007), Lisa Chamberlain, review of Floating City.

Unsplendid: An Online Journal of Poetry in Received and Nonce Forms,http://www.unsplendid.com/ (October 9, 2007), Douglas Basford, "‘Taking the Ears at Their Peak’: McHenry and Wiese's Debut Books."