Search results for ""author anthony mccann""

Like moonlight, McCann's attention gives weird clarity and an alien glow to post-industrial landscapes and human interiors. These poems are startling and irreverent, but also emotional and approachable. They uncivilize us into seeing the world as both ruin and possibility: "It was danger/ gave them life/ but damage/ makes us shine." Anthony McCann is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His books include I Heart Your Fate, Moongarden, and Father of Noise. He lives in Los Angeles.

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With tender attention and a keenly embodied curiosity, the poems in I am the dead, who, you take care of me are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead. Following the poet’s recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is “a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat.” By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, Anthony McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. “I want life/but for the living” he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these are works which ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.

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"The poems of Anthony McCann are beautiful, brutal, and unerring. They present us with, or return us to, a complicated, violent, poignant, weird, and mysterious world--a world which is very particularly his, and also our own, re-sung. For some time now I have believed McCann to be one of the finest poets writing today."--Maggie Nelson "McCann demonstrates that the truth surrounds us all; our best way of connecting with it is through compassion and love. With equal parts exuberance and dread, the speaker encourages us to 'waste the whole day feeling these things.'"--Boston Review Thing Music is full of flesh, of creatures tangled in their worlds. Marked variously by the desert and coastal landscapes of Southern California and the intersections of phenomenology and anarchism, these poems are porous bodies, traversed by light and noise. From "Mouth Guitar": Now the pulsing afternoon takes each belly in its hands lifts it up towards some glass and all that's inside While he crawled on with his body towards vengeance or the state Anthony McCann lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the University of California-Riverside's Palm Desert MFA program. He is the "Poet Laureate" of Machine Project, and also teaches courses at the California Institute of the Arts.

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"The poems of Anthony McCann are beautiful, brutal, and unerring. They present us with, or return us to, a complicated, violent, poignant, weird, and mysterious world--a world which is very particularly his, and also our own, re-sung. For some time now I have believed McCann to be one of the finest poets writing today, and as I Heart Your Fate makes clear, he is only getting better."--Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty In his third collection of poetry, Anthony McCann fuses the worlds of dream, art, love, and brute humanity, taking the redemptive power of the romantic to new and surprising extremes. "I don't have a body to feel afraid," writes McCann, and these poems, bald and imaginative, almost convince the reader it must be so, save for the fact that they are so vitally, essentially human. From "Of the Mockingbird": So that once again, beloved readers, I find that I have died. I die each time inside my body each time I eat your food-- O World (By which I always mean THE LIGHT) Or let's just say there's a forehead between my body and the light and it deactivates the World Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. His previous books include Moongarden and Father of Noise. He lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and works with Machine Project.

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