One can immediately tell through the vulnerabilities captured in the collection that McNally is a heart-on-the-sleeve type poet. With this second volume, he chronicles the life of the worker across a landscape of American politics that lays bare personal grief alongside a public manifesto. He laments the fractured reality of the present day with deep moral seriousness. While the politics are pointed, they never come across as partisan screed.
Tag: American poetry
A review of Rail by Kai Carlson-Wee
Kai Carlson-Wee’s debut book Rail embarks on a never-ending journey that montages places in his life, from a freight train to apartments to highways to skate parks to the rolling hills of the prairie to a dumpster. At the heart of the narrative, Carlson-Wee discusses life on the road, spiritual poverty, addiction, liminal spaces, and the erasure of America’s past.
A review of Autoplay by Julie Babcock
It is tempting to say that Autoplay by Julie Babcock is a collection of poems about Ohio. It is and more. One way to put order to this book, a task that is almost if not totally impossible to do, is to separate the poems into categories. The Ohio poems would be one category. Another category would be poems dealing with childhood and adulthood.