#Monica mcclure word writer how to#
#Monica mcclure word writer series#

Best are the 'My Christopher Poems,' love lyrics recognizable as such-what else could they be?-and yet uniquely tender: weird, wired records of affection, that daily fever.' 'It’s a pleasure to be a guest in Jennifer Soong’s good mind-these poems welcome me, though my being there is occasioned by an urgency, a need to attend to shared fears and singular predicaments. In these poems 'the mind is a guest,' though the bodies of reader & writer are never simply at rest, but dance on the rhythms of a language (or, better, languages) that keep teaching us new steps.'

#Monica mcclure word writer how to#

she knows how to sharpen her 'ability to respond' (to quote Robert Duncan) with care, accuracy, & insight, able as she is to read even the tracings of trapped vapor trails clinging to the roof of her coffee lid. How much we demand / from the daily murders passing…' The demands of poetry are indeed that stark - & Jennifer Soong knows her responsibility, i.e. The opening makes clear the necessary labor of the poet-augur: 'How little we rest. 'This, a most welcome & brilliant first book, knows the rich yolk of poetry & the as malleable as breathtaking yoke of form, 'a crave for new mathematics'.

Come near, these poems tell us, and we feel we’ll arrive at exactly the time and place we need to be.' Certain poetry collections are written to be 'of the moment,' but a collection such as Near, At is written to give pace to those moments, with each carefully placed word a further step taken by the poet and reader together. Simultaneously, Soong accomplishes something utterly unexpected in 2019: she casts a harpoon into the New England landscape poem – long linked to the genteel, the male, the WASP – and brings it vibrant and expansive into the twenty-first century. 'Jennifer Soong’s collection displays her nuanced understanding of how the philosophical-treatise-as-poem can birth an emotional and embodied intelligence, placing her in a line of affinity with contemporary writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson and Anne Boyer. Rooted in both the traditional and the experimental, it asks just how little of ourselves we can be.

#Monica mcclure word writer series#

Divided into five parts, each with its own form, and followed by a series of ongoing love poems called MY CHRISTOPHER POEMS, this debut collection is slow to assume but quick to adjust. A sustained exploration of language, capitalism, gender, and nature, Near, At traverses and measures the movement of silence against the movement of thought and its pauses. Near, At follows the inherent strangeness of one’s consciousness as it observes and comes into contact with the physical world.