While living in Boston, Gale worked towards earning her master’s degree in English at the University of Massachusetts. She won the American Academy of Poets contest in 1984 with her poem “Turner.”
When she was in treatment for her illness, Gale began to look back on some of her work. In a journal entry, she wrote, “It has been a pure joy to turn back to these poems and discover what in them is alive.” At the time, she had been working on a collection of 40 poems to publish.
Gale wrote, “You can read these poems and understand what concerns me, what moves me. They are a mirror of my creative self during my mid-twenties.”
Breathing the Light
(Click on a poem’s title in the Table of Contents to read it.)