Lynn McGee
Sober Cooking, new
full-length collection from Spuyten Duyvil Press
Heartbreak lives in the pages of Sober Cooking by Lynn McGee. Yet so does joy as the poet keenly observes and experiences life in the small details that render love—for lovers and place and family. These poems of loss and mortality are alive in this poet’s command of language and her art, from image to tone to pace, and, finally, in their surprise. They are genuine from their first lines to their resonate last lines. Each poem makes us feel the poet’s pain, irony, and affections as well as our own.
—Elizabeth Haukaas, author of Leap, winner of the 2009 Walt McDonald Prize
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Heirloom Bulldog, Winner of the 2014 Bright Hill Press Chapbook Contest
Lynn McGee's chapbook bestiary is a strong collection of poems that celebrate the animal world and the animal within us. Beginning with the jarring poem "Luck" these poems, through a combination of lyricism and narrative, meditate on our relationship to the wild and the domestic.
— Gerry LaFemina, author of Vanishing Horizon, Little Heretic, The Window Facing Winter, and forthcoming: Ash.
Heirloom Bulldog explores humankind’s relationship to the rest of the animal world, wild and domesticated. In her collection of often playfully rendered, yet serious poems, who else but Lynn McGee would think to compare a dog to a tomato (in the title poem), overbred to a fault? She writes: "Something had to be stopped,/and it would not be me." Neither can the reader stop, through poems that draw one into the lives of, among others, an absconding pet rat, a self-injuring Ghanaian lizard, and dumpster-diving coyotes. The means other animals have to contend with us may not always make a pretty picture, but altogether, this is a gorgeous collection of poems.
—Susana H. Case, author of Drugstore Blue, 4 Rms w Vu, Elvis Presley's Hips & Mick Jagger's Lips and The Scottish Cafe
An ironic bestiary, these subtly crafted poems focus on animals while exposing human travails. Indeed, Lynn McGee empathizes with animals, "This rat goes where I go. / I am equal, in his eyes." Her elegiac voice—keening and defiant—affirms the right to belong and prevail. Exhilarating the reader with claw-sharp nouns and verbs, the poet burrows below the surface, providing nuanced layers: "'[T]unnels beneath /the crackle of electronic fences." Instead of feeling fenced in, however, the poet asserts, 'There are some who treat the air/like an equal'. As readers, we breathe in its life-giving atmosphere.
—Dean Kostos, author of This Is Not a Skyscraper, winner of the 2013 Benjamin Saltman Award
Bonanza, Winner of the 1996 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition
Bonanza is a collection of poems which lives up to its title—a rich vein mined by an observer-poet as intelligent as she is wonderful. Here disguises, gender roles and identifications, shifting victims and sacrifices are all motifs in the complex mix of what erodes, what stays.
—Carole Simmons Oles, author of A Selected History of her Heart: Poems
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