Marty McConnell
Winner of the聽2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize
What does it mean to be bodied in such a way that one is simultaneously weapon and target? To exist within a species tipping toward extinction? How do we navigate the landscape of our own damage, received and inflicted, in such a way as to move through individual survival and into a common joy? The gift and the trap of聽the human body and its attachments to this world converge and dissolve in these poems of ecstatic music, animated rage, and wild, generative hope.
鈥泪苍 these brave, bold and edgy poems, Marty McConnell speaks with determination聽and authority. She takes her/our daily life struggles and forces us to face them, to聽find purpose and meaning. This collection contains some of McConnell鈥檚 best work.聽Every line, every image, reveals a dramatic new world, a new challenge to grapple聽with. Here lies a meditation on life, love, survival. Read aloud, you will discover a聽new self.鈥� 聽 聽 聽
-Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
鈥淚f future generations want to know what it meant to live in the belly of the beast at聽this moment in history, they would do well to read the poems of Marty McConnell.聽These are poems that bear witness and much more: they explore a remarkable聽range of human experiences and emotional registers. There is fiery condemnation聽of injustice and jubilant praise of everyday pleasures; there are voices from the聽margins and voices of privilege that burn with searing honesty; there is fragmented聽language that mirrors the fragmentation of our times, and there is language that聽speaks with the clarity of prophecy. Above all, there is love, of both a personal and聽political nature, that resonates with hope. I, for one, am grateful for the blaze of聽electricity in these poems of Marty McConnell, for the thunderstorms and lamplight聽which illuminate our darkness.鈥� 聽聽
-Mart铆n Espada
鈥泪苍 when they say you can鈥檛 go home again, what they mean is you were never there,聽Marty McConnell asks, 鈥楬ow shall we pretty for this ruin?鈥� She awaits apocalypse yet wards it off with inventory and lexicon in the service of love: 鈥業 think // our speaking redoes the world.鈥� Her book remains startling in its freshness and candor, and especially in its insistent hope for our future.鈥�
-Michael Waters
Read Rochelle Hurt's interview with Marty...
The if they say you can't go home again, what they mean is you were never there cover artist is .