Extremely Expensive Mystical Experiences for Astronauts

We face life-changing incidents and stories, sometimes never-to-be-repeated-once-in-a-lifetime-remarkably-rare experiences, and these occasions haunt us, we obsess and we return to them. We believe they make us who we are. We return to them as evidence of something that gives meaning to our lives. We spend time realizing by means of them what has not previously occurred to us. These may be episodes, ordeals, trials, shocks, traumas, storms, violence, other-worldly adventures or physical upheavals or one word one person once said to us, resulting in what we call on-going epiphanies and life-marking. I've always wanted to write poems that appeal to someone else's desire to put into words what seems impossible to put into words. In other words, I try to write poems that in some way or another honors and pays homage to poetry itself for being available to us when we need it to do what only it can do in the way it does.   Dara Barrois/Dixon, formerly Dara Wier, lives and works in western Massachusetts. Born in New Orleans, raised near the mouth of the Mississippi River, she's spent years in the South, Midwest, Southwest and New England. Her recent book is Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina and the chapbooks Two Poems and Nine. Other books include You Good Thing, a Believer's Readers Choice and Reverse Rapture, The American Poetry Center's Annual Book Award chosen by Stephen Rodefer. Dara's poems and prose have been supported by the Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and Massachusetts Cultural Council. She formerly published under the name Dara Wier.