(Broadstone Books, 2019)

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Lynn McGee sees the world in fierce vivid takes. Her poems explore a woman’s love for a woman, the loss of a beloved sister, and the dailiness of challenges to both family and fellow travelers. Via quick poetic clips and the New York City subway system, she catapults us through tunnels and on elevated tracks into the “hard curves.” In her poem “Ledge,” McGee writes: “A machine was in charge then / and a machine / is in charge now….

 

—Joseph Zaccardi, Marin County, former California poet Laureate and author of A Wolf Stands Alone in Water

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"These are eye-opening poems that transform an ordinary city bus into a box of light rushing through a cityscape and subways move through "crumbling shoulders of tenements." Devoid of judgement, her chiseled language startles with originality. It rushes to the city’s erratic beat, slows to witness girls whipping their heads "as if shaking off water." Always looking, the poet urgently reports back our human experience with expansive tenderness and physicality. Her subjects are on their way somewhere else. You will want to linger, watching alongside her.  

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—Pamela Davis, 2014 ABZ Poetry Prize Winner for her full-length collection of poetry, Lunette

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Tracks, by Lynn McGee, carries us like passengers on a train into the human life of the daily commute. We board each poem and take a ride. The scenery streams past us, each of us inhabiting a body that travels through life with a private song streaming into our heads, "One in a million!" Intimate, open-hearted, McGee’s voice as fellow-voyager and guide is pitch perfect. Tracks are the prints to follow to your destination. They are the words McGee uses to “to wake myself / and write this life, / into something I want.” These poems will take you there.

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—Mary-Sherman Willis, author of the book-length poem, Graffiti Calculus, and Grace Notes Appogiatures, a translation of the work of Jean Cocteau

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Poems in Tracks have been published in The Hawaii Review, Potomac Review, The Southern Poetry Review, Across the Margin and others.

 

The cover art of Tracks is an oil painting, Chicago El, by the Chicago artist Teresa Parod.