The poems of Josie Kearns have appeared in The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest Passages North, and have been widely anthologized elsewhere. She is the author of Life After the Line, and New Numbers, as well as the editor of New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry. She has been awarded grants from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Cowden Fellowship, three Hopwood Awards from the Jules and Avery Hopwood Foundation, and the first MacLeod-Grobe Prize from Poetry Northwest. She has been a soda jerk, reporter, factory worker, and grants writer, and currently teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

"The title poem begins with an epigraph apparently spoken by a scientist who was trying to explain the term overkill to a congressional committee: 'We need new numbers for this.' Kearns then begins looking for those new numbers, the ones that might fit situations that fall outside our usual patterns of quantification. She even gives these numbers names, and those names in her table of contents create their own weirdly beautiful catalog: Sping, Clazura, Quaro, Endearth, Eenum, Lumaroon, Leethum. And then she gives these numbers their situations" -Keith Taylor, on New Numbers

To view Special Collections' holdings of Josie Kearns' work, please click here.

To hear Kearns read from her own work, please visit the Vincent Voice Library, here.