Chelsea Bunn is a poet and educator living in New Mexico. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a BA in English from Hunter College in New York. A two-time recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, her poems appear in Best New Poets 2018, Sooth Swarm Journal, Noble / Gas Qtrly, Dogwood, Georgetown Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in NYC, she serves as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing for the BFA program at Navajo Technical University.

Forgiveness is not a book about forgiveness, but is instead a book about the desire for forgiveness, which can be the most overpowering of all desires, particularly when it cannot be satisfied. The most accomplished of these poems—in particular, “Inheritance”— become traps in the moment that unsatisfiable desire breaks from the poem to overwhelm the reader, and it is in those moments that Chelsea Bunn’s inescapable art is perfected.

—SHANE MCCRAE In the Language of My Captor