Mark Scroggins was born on a military base in Frankfurt am Main, and grew up in various places, relocating at drearily inevitable two-year intervals — West Germany, upstate New York, California, Texas, and Kentucky — and ultimately settling in Tennessee. He was educated at Virginia Tech and Cornell University, and now lives in south Florida, where he teaches and directs the graduate program in English at Florida Atlantic University. His previous books of poetry are Anarchy (Spuyten Duyvil, 2003) and Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles (Cultural Society, 2011). His The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007) was widely reviewed. He writes regularly on contemporary poetry for Parnassus: Poetry in Review and Chicago Review , and has published critical essays in a wide range of journals and collections.