Dunkle, Iris Jamahl Dinosaur You can feel the sadness of the large head that floats like a planet in the museum, the metronome of feet shuffling past a little sun powdering the lifted dust              and its haloed. Weeks,             years,               knees red-raw in the dug dirt. A scientist dug you free and spelt you out for your new skin. Now the dinosaur contains what we imagined: a life that's visible we can reconstruct, and all these people shuffling past Faith, or what church do you believe in. What's behind the glass behind the skin of this life as we pass I am an alphabet of bones, my own telling. "In the moment at the beginning of language words were more than magical, naming things into existence. A world in duress needs new poetry whose structures and intentions allow a humanizing. I found the poems in Iris Dunkle's Gold Passage to be as necessary as those original pronouncements. Musical and delicate, this work comforts me with its flashes of knowledge that feel the same time ancient and utterly new." -Kazim Ali "One of the ancient symbols of poetry is Adam naming the animals of Eden--first connecting words with the world. Iris Jamahl Dunkle's Gold Passage pursues this Edenic mission. The vibrant gesture of her poetry is to give names to the shifting images of existence - things as concrete as a bird or a bobcat or as mysterious as the weight of memory and the invisible energy of love." --Dana Gioia "...I envy the east with which Dunkle mixes mythology and modernity, and love best how in her short meditative nature poems she weaves traces of the domestic life. When I set aside my favorite poems to cite here, I found myself dog-earing every poem. Gold Passage is authentic, lyrical and unforgettable." -Jane Shore. Iris Jamahl Dunkle's debut poetry collection, Gold Passage , won the Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press in 2013. Her chapbooks Inheritance and The Flying Trolley were published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry, essays and creative non-fiction have been published widely.Dunkle teaches writing and literature at Napa Valley College.She received her B.A. from the George Washington University, her M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University, and her Ph.D. in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. She is on the staff of the Napa Valley Writers conference Used Book in Good Condition