Winter Editions – förlag

Monica McClure's second poetry collection excavates inheritances--historical, cultural, familial, and economic--as it alternates between magnified and microscopic views of American life.

Born in rural Texas in 1986, the oldest of seven children, and once described by Craig Teicher of NPR as "the poster-girl for a new generation of poets," McClure revises the nuances of class, race, and clashing identities in a polyvocal style that flows out of her experience as an ambiguous academic turned ambivalent corporate creative; a firsthand witness to rural poverty and its colonial origins; a white Chicana with a vexed position in American society; an educated urbanite with a deep connection to the folklore and wisdom of her agricultural-worker ancestors. THE GONE THING upends traditions of pastoral poetry and bucolic subject matter, using the allegory of land stewardship to sketch a jagged narrative of personal and collective loss. Sometimes self-conscious, often unequivocally sincere, the lines that compose these poems lull and jolt their way across different landscapes: barren political realms, the author's own fertile body, a suffering natural world, and an amnesiac society, in which the speaker works, shops, marvels, suffers, and doesn't die.

"The border is the terrain of Monica McClure's poems, her world a flammable one made of money, work, worth. Her hypnotic stanzas burn with the kind of superheated attention that intensifies sight itself. With the prophetic intimacy and perfect aim of Alice Notley and Chelsey Minnis, McClure's hallucinatory poems press against reality not a mirror but a lit cigarette--as if to see what the real will reveal about itself, now that it's on fire. What can heat teach us. How much hotter can it get."--Joyelle McSweeney

"Monica McClure's close-to-the-bone collection of remembrance and reverie takes you on a skin-scented slow dance through what Keats called the Mansion of Many Apartments, this time with Lana Del Rey's 'National Anthem' spinning softly in the background. So skillfully does McClure dissect the cruel poetics of beauty, loss, love, and the sharp inflection points of class, race, and gender that, to put it quite plainly, this book will slay you in your sleep."--Kim Rosenfield

"Finely crafted but never overworked. This book is everything poetry should be: fresh, alive, surprising; explosive, daring, brutal; honest, searching, hungry."--Ethan Stebbins

"In Monica McClure's extraordinary new book, transformations abound: memories are disinterred into the present as dreamlike miniatures of variously-classed American life, at times mordant, at times severe. Any one thing seems always to be in the process of becoming another. The figures in McClure's poems are not just blurred, they're running. The poems narrate escape, tenuous and vibrating -- escape from home, from acute desperation, from a bleak and threatening past that feels increasingly like a future. The 'gone thing' is what is missing and therefore ever-present, the hole burned into one's life by a torch of comprehensive predacity. That you have maybe crawled out of that hole does not delete it; it just leaves you staring back in fearful relief, waiting to slip."--Josef Kaplan

Poetry. Family & Relationships. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies.

In his second book of poems, Ahmad Almallah seeks a language that captures the afterlives of the mother tongue. This collection blurs the borders between languages, between the living and the dead, between presence and absence.

The poems of BORDER WISDOM break and mourn physical borders at the same time. Here the exilic idea of a return to a home is expressed in the daily return to the blank page in search of a poem. In these returns the body brushes against the past and, as Hart Crane puts it, taps into "that memory all things nurse."

"In BORDER WISDOM, Ahmad Almallah takes the notable step of writing in a mix of Arabic and English scripts, a bilingual poetics that has surfaced intermittently among the finest of our experimental writers. For this and for his exemplary writings in standalone English, I would extend to him the well-known welcome that Emerson directed to Whitman nearly two centuries ago: 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career.'"--Jerome Rothenberg

"BORDER WISDOM reassembles the loss of a mother, mother tongue, and motherland, and gives pain a passage. The Arabic and English become 'windows [that] know something of the hidden world.' These poems are infinite and steadily moving in memory of all that's gone, and all that will be regained. A piercing collection."--Nathalie Handal

"Ahmad Almallah observes the dust that rises when war and grief collide in the rubble of brief existences made briefer by geopolitical devastations. These poems honor the daily trembling and unexpected questions that accompany the losses of one's spaces of origin--one's mother, one's land, one's language. I won't lie and say that it is easy to read this unflinching work, these searing confrontations with the lividity and ferocity of grief. But I admire a poet who is unafraid to rise up and be a pallbearer, who is unafraid to point out the difficulty of holding in our memory what we would rather hold in our arms."--Divya Victor

"Reading this book, one comes to understand that one of the most astounding, paradoxical companions to our grief is precision."--Polina Barskova

"Almallah offers us a dazzling contemplation on the mother tongue and on transposing that tongue, so naturally, into a second language, making the Arabic of the unconscious glaringly visible on the page, subversively complementing the prevalent English of this poetic Möbius strip."--Antón Shammás

"Almallah's writing is immensely relevant; we need his voice."--Naomi Shihab Nye

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies.