If Dr. Siobhán Scarry’s new book were a piece of visual art, it would be described as “mixed media.”
Parlor Press will publish Figure in a Field: Poems & Investigations later this year through its imprint Illuminations: A Series on American Poetics, edited by Jon Thompson.
Scarry is professor of English and chair of the English department at Bethel College, where she has taught since 2014.
“This is a hybrid book,” Scarry says, “making use of different genres – for example, lyric poetry, erasure poems, pieces that look like prose poems but function more like miniature pieces of literary criticism, a letter that functions like an essay.”
Scarry’s last book, Pilgrimly, a collection of poems, came out in 2014, also from Parlor Press with their imprint Free Verse Editions.
“[Figure in a Field] is a bit of a departure for me,” she says. “From 2014 to 2024, I’d been writing poems and also working on a long poetry sequence that was operating at the hinge of poetry and criticism.
“It wasn’t until the last 16 months, after a nudge from my editor to lean into some additional experiments with form, that the book really came together.”
There will be a public book launch sometime next fall when Figure in a Field is published.
Scarry has a B.A. in history from the University of Arizona, an M.A. in English and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. in poetics from SUNY-Buffalo.
In addition to her teaching and scholarship, she is the faculty adviser for Bethel’s literary magazine YAWP! and runs the English department’s Visiting Writer Series.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel is ranked #25 in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Regional College Midwest for 2026. Bethel was the only Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Community Healing and Transformation (TCHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see www.bethelks.edu
