“Swan, As the Light Was Changing,” a poem by BOA poet Aracelis Girmay, is “Poem of the Week,” according to the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre. The poem was recently published by BOA in Girmay’s latest book, Kingdom Animalia, which won the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. The poems in the book are considered to be “elegiac,” embracing and celebrating the dead along with the living. Girmay sees everything as “animal” in nature, and her poems give credit to all that is “difficult and beautiful about our time on earth.” The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre was established by the University’s English Department in 1998, with the overall goals to “produce research into 20^th and 21^st century poetry, promote poetry in the local community, encourage connections between poets, academics, and readers of poetry, and create space for discussion of issues surrounding 20^th and 21^st century poetry.” The Poetry Centre pursues these goals by hosting numerous events and regularly naming a new “Poem of the Week." To read the poem, click here. To make Kingdom Animalia your own, click here. And if you really love clicking links, click here to watch Aracelis Girmay read from her work!