is the author of two collections: Ultima Thule (Yale 2000), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Dismal Rock (Tupelo 2007), which won the Dorset Prize. He is currently the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. This poem is from a sequence about the killing, on January 16, 1902, of the last gray wolf in Edmonson County, Kentucky.