Stephen Behrendt was born in Marinette, Wisconsin, and took his PhD at the University of Wisconsin. He lives now in Nebraska, where he is George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. An international authority on British Romantic literature and culture, he is also a widely published poet. The most recent of his four collections is Refractions (Shechem Press, 2014). The poems here are from a book-length manuscript, Chrysanthemum.