Deborah Ager

Snowy Street

Bio: Deborah Ager’s writing has appeared in The Tablet, The Week, and MSN and been featured on public radio’s Milk Street Radio. She’s founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine. Many poems first appearing in the magazine have been honored in the Best American Poetry and Best New Poets anthologies and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily.

She’s received writing fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and others.

Website: https://www.radiantmedialabs.com/writing

Instagram: deborah.ager

Statement:  After watching the video “Snowy Street,” I was drawn to the idea of writing a ghazal (pronounced “guzzle”). This poetic form originated in Arabic literature. The topics of this form often focus on love, loss, and longing. Since the “At My Window" project touches on these themes, my intention is that this ghazal honors and supports the project’s intention.

The ghazal calls for each couplet to work on its own while also contributing to the overarching theme. When you read the couplets, you’ll notice repetition. A ghazal calls for each couplet to end on the same word (“tonight” in this poem), which is preceded by a rhyming word (champagne, arcane, and so on in this poem), except in the first couplet when the “rhyming words” appear twice.