There are countless ways to end poems, and yet the great majority of endings do one of two things: greatly contract the focus of the poem, or expand it wider than any first-time reader could anticipate. In this masterclass, by taking a close look at some poems we’ll discover how the use of imagery, line-breaks, quotes, leaps, surprises and other “tricks” lead to their satisfactory conclusions.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf , Small Gods of Grief, which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry, and A New Hunger, which was selected as a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her fourth book, These Many Rooms, came out from Four Way Books in 2019. With her late husband, the poet Kurt Brown, she translated a book by Flemish poet, Herman de Coninck: The Plural of Happiness. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the editor of five anthologies, she taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College, University of California, Santa Barbara, and at the Solstice low residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program. She served as Santa Barbara’s poet laureate from 2019 to 2021.