Her first collection, "Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends", was privately published in 1983 with the help of friends. While she found a commercial publisher for her second collection, "Strangely Marked Metal" (1985), her work went nearly unrecognized until the mid-1990s, when some of her poems were anthologized and the first reviews in national journals were published. She became widely recognized following her receipt of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2004, and published her sixth collection of poetry, "The Niagara River", in 2005.