Dorsey Craft reads “When We Invented Gunpowder, We Were Trying to Invent the Elixir of Life” from Shō No. 5.
“I wrote this poem at a writing residency at the Anderson Center at Tower View. I was there to research gun culture, and I found this strange (possibly apocryphal?) fact that made me want to write. I followed the sound and tried not to overthink it. I was pumping milk five times a day to send back to my nine month old son in a refrigerated container, so it was impossible not to see everything as related to that project.”
— Dorsey Craft
Dorsey Craft is the author of A Brief History of Accidental Inventions, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2026, and Plunder (Bauhan Publishing, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of North Florida and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Agni. She is also the co-organizer of Dreamboat Poetry Series in Jacksonville, FL.