This Must Be The Place (Mayapple Press), my first collection of poetry! Available from Mayapple or Amazon or in Chicago at Women & Children First bookstore.

What people are saying:

Maureen Seaton: In This Must Be The Place Alice George has packaged her beguiling and ubiquitous mind in impeccably wrought, imaginatively conceived, stunning lyric narrativaes--collages, prose, lively couplets and series within series. Through everything wonderful--the politial, familial, and fantastic--she gives us her steady, settling voice. What a holiday! I adore this book!

Chris Green: In This Must Be the Place, Alice George captures the worry and wonder of ordinary life—the fullness of family, spirituality, illness, nature, food; she’s restless, covering everything, and somehow her thinking is uncluttered but also complicated—as if the earth could be permanent but also spinning away.

Kathleen Kirk (excerpt from review forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, 2010): The atheist speaker of all the poems in this lovely, challenging book is lonely in the world and has nested in the paradox of rejecting myth and mythologizing truth. This book is rich with strange equations—an atheist who can say, “In my version of the afterlife Grandma is riding an elephant.”

There is a lot of water in this book. Rain, clouds, blood. The speaker of “Stuff” gets so thirsty she drinks from the hose. The last line of “Wet Song” is “This is my home.”

George faces peril and loneliness not just on the river, or in the godless world, but also in art, where “[h]umans sag within their garments as if hope wouldn’t know them, as if nothing could warm those painted rooms, neither pulses nor breathing.” Fortunately for her and for us, “bodies fall apart into something useful.” We can choose the river, the air, the ground.

2007-2008 Print Publications

Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007)
Three pieces by myself and co-conspirator Cecilia Pinto

Letters to the World: Poems from the Wo-Po Listserve (Red Hen Press, 2008)

Seneca Review (2008)
In the afterlife Grandma is riding an Elephant

Recent & Forthcoming Publications

Field: a poem forthcoming in Fall of 2009

Qarrtsiluni: two prose poems online, inspired by movie genres

Prick of the Spindle: two poems online

In The Mist: one poem online

Fifth Wednesday: one poem forthcoming in print (2009)

Diagram: several pieces posted online

NEW: I occasionally offer small adult poetry workshops in the Chicago area. Email me to check on the current schedule.

I was very proud to be included in a special anthology dedicated to Obama's inauguration. Pictured here were some of the other contributing Chicago poets at a reading at Depaul on January 20, 2009. The book is available for a limited time, free of charge, at the website of DePaul University's Humanities Center.

I'm proud to serve on the Advisory Board of Rhino.

Unscrew the locks from the doors
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs 
~Walt Whitman              

The images on this page were created by moi.