Caroline Finkelstein

Caroline Finkelstein (born New York City) is an American poet.

Life

As a girl, Finkelstein led what she calls “a bifurcated life, half American, half some idea of upper bourgeois European society...This upbringing maintains itself in many of my poems as mood, or attitude, or actual subject matter”.

She was married at nineteen and had three children.

She graduated from Goddard College with an M.F.A., where she studied with Ellen Bryant Voigt, Robert Hass, and Michael Ryan. She was at Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.

In 1999 and 2000, she lived in Florence, studying Italian Renaissance art.

In 1982, 2001, 2003 she lived in Westport, Massachusetts. She visited Jane Kenyon shortly before her death.

She has published her work in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Fence, Paris Review, Seneca Review, New American Writing, and The American Poetry Review.

She lives in Roswell, Georgia.

Awards

• two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts
• Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Vermont Arts Council grants
• 1999 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship
• Fellow at the MacDowell Colony

Works

Poetry Books

• The Moment.

Quotes

About the poem, she writes: “I wrote ‘Conjecture Number One Thousand’ while I was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. It’s a rueful comment on my second marriage and an attempt at checking the longing that lives in my memories. The irony and occasional flippancy replicate much of the marriage’s shape. Being at MacDowell, where my former husband and I had once attended, only heightened the senses of loss and comedy within that loss.”