More Anon
Selected Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Selected poems of Maureen N. McLane
More Anon gathers a selection of poems from Maureen N. McLane’s critically acclaimed first five books of poetry.
McLane, whose 2014 collection This Blue was a finalist for the National Book Award, is a poet of wit and play, of romanticism and intellect, of song and polemic. More Anon presents her work anew. The poems spark with life, and the concentrated selection showcases her energy and style.
As Parul Seghal wrote in Bookforum, “To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. Hers is a roving, amphibious intelligence; she’s at home in the essay and the fragment, the polemic and the elegy.” In More Anon, McLane—a poet, scholar, and prizewinning critic—displays the full range of her vertiginous mind and daring experimentation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This strong collection assembles poems from McLane's first five books, presenting the work of a poet who locates the past in the present and revels in language's power to transgress limitations. In "Letter from Paris," McLane playfully deconstructs the Enlightenment: "I am drawing up an indictment/ of the French/ & Reason/ & Human Rights/ which begins by unlinking these concepts/ and concludes in weeping." McLane delights in collapsing high and low linguistic registers, as in her abecedarian poem "Poem": "As a man may go to Costco,/ Buy the jumbo pak of diapers, double liters of/ Coke and Diet Coke and a sixpack and stock up on/ Doritos and Cheetos and/ Eveready batteries, so I perhaps/ Formless in the vast republic/ Grasp the metaphysical thing, commodity, crucially desired/ Hologram of national intent." Yet underlying McLane's poems is a sense that society's relationship to the world around it is permeable and fantastically spontaneous: "Every time/ I collide with your mind/ I give off—/ something happens—/ we don't know what/ Particles, articles/ this bit, a bit/ digital, simple/ fission, fusion/ —a great vowel shift." This collection shines with a wonderful mix of irreverence and profundity.
