Purchase now at BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS
From the midnight streets of iconic Asbury Park, NJ to the concrete edges of suburban community pools, from hospital emergency rooms to the ocean wrack line, McCullough explores the wreckage of fallen kingdoms--the economy, marriage, gender binaries, class--and asks what ways our hearts get broken and rebuilt, what boundaries there are between people, what mercy, what forgiveness. Questioning the shadows in women's relationships, the residue of betrayals, political and personal, the power of eros, and the ways men can claim beauty and at what price, these poems speak of the way juniper berries give way to becoming gin, small deaths give birth to new life, one universe sidles up next to another, how galaxies share light, and the way two people put their foreheads together and, across that barrier of bone and blood, imagine their way into empathy.
Praise for McCullough’s 7th full length poetry collection:
If you, like the speaker in Laura McCullough’s poem, “Almost Nothing Something [stars / plates / cells]” have grown “tired & suspicious of poetry” Women & Other Hostages will absolutely revitalize you. These are riveting, wholly moving narratives of a life lived. Out of sorrow McCullough invokes a stunning grace where “What is stripped from you” becomes a gift because “what’s left behind is all your own.” Women of all circumstances inhabit these poems. They shed their skin like snakes, “memory in flesh,” and consider the bones of what holds us together in these divisive times. This beautiful book will knock loose what is lodged in your heart.
—Suzanne Frischkorn
Early in this collection, McCullough offers this: Tilt back your neck; expose your throat. / You know you want to be devoured. Each of these poems contains universes that quiver with desire, in one form or another. With heat. Both the fear of it as well as the joy. Desire is the engine that got us here, yet these poems push even beyond that, beyond forgiveness even, beyond this cage we all inhabit, out and into the deeper mysteries--don’t I know what it is like / to walk in a cloud of my own making?
— Nick Flynn
Read “Icarus in the House of Spirits” and “Holomataboly” at Blackbird
Read “Heat” at SWWIM
Read "Owls of Grace & Mercy" & "Satellites" at Mortar Magazine
Read “Marriage (trajectories)” and “The Public Pool” at Diode
Read “Marriage (more than mercy)” at TAB
Read the book’s preface poem “Medusa as a Parable of Faith & Resilience” in this issue of the South Florida Poetry Review
Read “Women & Other Female Indentifications” and “Heat & Shame” at Whimperbang
Read “Emoticonfiscated” at Green Mountains Review
Cover art is by Kyle Mosher
Praise for McCullough’s 7th full length poetry collection:
If you, like the speaker in Laura McCullough’s poem, “Almost Nothing Something [stars / plates / cells]” have grown “tired & suspicious of poetry” Women & Other Hostages will absolutely revitalize you. These are riveting, wholly moving narratives of a life lived. Out of sorrow McCullough invokes a stunning grace where “What is stripped from you” becomes a gift because “what’s left behind is all your own.” Women of all circumstances inhabit these poems. They shed their skin like snakes, “memory in flesh,” and consider the bones of what holds us together in these divisive times. This beautiful book will knock loose what is lodged in your heart.
—Suzanne Frischkorn
Early in this collection, McCullough offers this: Tilt back your neck; expose your throat. / You know you want to be devoured. Each of these poems contains universes that quiver with desire, in one form or another. With heat. Both the fear of it as well as the joy. Desire is the engine that got us here, yet these poems push even beyond that, beyond forgiveness even, beyond this cage we all inhabit, out and into the deeper mysteries--don’t I know what it is like / to walk in a cloud of my own making?
— Nick Flynn
Read “Icarus in the House of Spirits” and “Holomataboly” at Blackbird
Read “Heat” at SWWIM
Read "Owls of Grace & Mercy" & "Satellites" at Mortar Magazine
Read “Marriage (trajectories)” and “The Public Pool” at Diode
Read “Marriage (more than mercy)” at TAB
Read the book’s preface poem “Medusa as a Parable of Faith & Resilience” in this issue of the South Florida Poetry Review
Read “Women & Other Female Indentifications” and “Heat & Shame” at Whimperbang
Read “Emoticonfiscated” at Green Mountains Review
Cover art is by Kyle Mosher
The Wild Night Dress
Miller Williams Poetry Series,University of Arkansas Press
Through her near unbearable grief, McCullough creates poems that slip between science and nature as she grasps at coordinates in a world spun out of its orbit. From the God Particle to toroidal vortexes, from the slippery linguistics of translation to the translation of the body, McCullough brings readers to the mystery of surrender, and the paradox that what we bear can make us more beautiful, that there is a gift in grief.
Read this review at The Line Break:
“This poet has the kind of binocular vision
that can see the poetic and scientific aspects of the world simultaneously. . . .
this shuffling together of lyrical/botanical and medical language
is done so gracefully, it has the effect
of bringing ‘the two cultures’ into a rare state of peaceful coexistence.”
—Billy Collins
Cover art by the photographer Laurent Seroussi
Click here for: A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race, Georgia University Press, or here. Read this review at Connotations Press.
Searing, evocative reflections on how literature addresses a perennially vexed issue
Reviews:
“Race is an old topic in poetry, but it still urges for in-depth exploration of visible or invisible labels of politics and racialization in America. This book, which gathers a collection of essays from poets and critics of different races, presents multiangle views about race and its relationship with poetry; the combined perspectives in A Sense of Regard has the potential to make a more significant contribution to the topic of poetry and race than any single author could accomplish.”
—Jianqing Zheng, editor of The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku
“An important book. I am hard pressed to think of many anthologies that take on a cultural scope this wide and varied. Such a book needs to exist in the world, especially since our literary landscape largely lacks this kind of critical engagement with poetry, specifically written by poets rather than ‘traditional scholars.’”
—Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite
Searing, evocative reflections on how literature addresses a perennially vexed issue
Reviews:
“Race is an old topic in poetry, but it still urges for in-depth exploration of visible or invisible labels of politics and racialization in America. This book, which gathers a collection of essays from poets and critics of different races, presents multiangle views about race and its relationship with poetry; the combined perspectives in A Sense of Regard has the potential to make a more significant contribution to the topic of poetry and race than any single author could accomplish.”
—Jianqing Zheng, editor of The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku
“An important book. I am hard pressed to think of many anthologies that take on a cultural scope this wide and varied. Such a book needs to exist in the world, especially since our literary landscape largely lacks this kind of critical engagement with poetry, specifically written by poets rather than ‘traditional scholars.’”
—Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite
Rigger Death & Hoist Another
Black Lawrence Press Read review at New Pages!
These poems fly across the page as they reveal a mind that questions and reveres in equal measure.
--Bob Hicok
David Rivard, says, This book has grainy, sweaty, sly, pissed-off, sweet-smelling, headstrong, sad-eyed, immensely loyal glamour.
--Bob Hicok
David Rivard, says, This book has grainy, sweaty, sly, pissed-off, sweet-smelling, headstrong, sad-eyed, immensely loyal glamour.
JERSEY MERCY
These poems are hilarious, poignant, and invaluable for the glimpse they give us of the hangouts and humanity in the state America simply couldn't live without.
--Patricia Smith
Set along the Jersey shore, before and after Hurricane Sandy, these narratives vividly capture the lives and speech of Jersey denizens like Mercy, a young waitresses, and Tino, a boardwalk musician. Piers, racetracks, and bars endure natural disasters. Mercy, too, endures. McCullough’s craft is striking. --Eduardo C. Corral
Boardwalk country, Bruce country, country of racetrack and abandoned carousel--with rhythmic pizzazz, McCullough spins the salt air of the Jersey Shore into the poems of Jersey Mercy. They shake and rattle and plunge forward, they pump fists and sweat, yet underneath all their raucous fluency they yearn and love and hurt so good like the best three-minute radio songs.
—Michael Waters
These poems are hilarious, poignant, and invaluable for the glimpse they give us of the hangouts and humanity in the state America simply couldn't live without.
--Patricia Smith
Set along the Jersey shore, before and after Hurricane Sandy, these narratives vividly capture the lives and speech of Jersey denizens like Mercy, a young waitresses, and Tino, a boardwalk musician. Piers, racetracks, and bars endure natural disasters. Mercy, too, endures. McCullough’s craft is striking. --Eduardo C. Corral
Boardwalk country, Bruce country, country of racetrack and abandoned carousel--with rhythmic pizzazz, McCullough spins the salt air of the Jersey Shore into the poems of Jersey Mercy. They shake and rattle and plunge forward, they pump fists and sweat, yet underneath all their raucous fluency they yearn and love and hurt so good like the best three-minute radio songs.
—Michael Waters
Panic
Alice James Books
Mark Doty says, Panic is a news broadcast from the edge—literally, the shoreline,
the coast where New Jersey's towns give onto open water, and figuratively,
the nervous boundary of contemporary life, with its negligence and violence.
Read this review at Coldfront:
the coast where New Jersey's towns give onto open water, and figuratively,
the nervous boundary of contemporary life, with its negligence and violence.
Read this review at Coldfront:
Speech Acts
Order it here: Black Lawrence Press
Read this review by Derek Pollard here!
Laura McCullough's book Speech Acts lives up to its title--so many of these poems take as their starting point the social occasion of a speaker wondering how to talk--naughty or nice-like?, over-educated, or heartfelt? The results are bright with velocity, lexical intelligence, and a distinctive fusion of headiness and carnality. McCullough's poems are manic, humane, and crackle with what the Reverend Marvin Gaye would have called "textual healing." -- Tony Hoagland
Laura McCullough's book Speech Acts lives up to its title--so many of these poems take as their starting point the social occasion of a speaker wondering how to talk--naughty or nice-like?, over-educated, or heartfelt? The results are bright with velocity, lexical intelligence, and a distinctive fusion of headiness and carnality. McCullough's poems are manic, humane, and crackle with what the Reverend Marvin Gaye would have called "textual healing." -- Tony Hoagland
Click here for: The Room & the World: Essays on Stephen Dunn or here. Syracuse University Press
The first book of its kind to explore and unpack the Pulitzer winning poet's oeuvre. Including 24 essays, a preface by poet and essayist Dave Smith, and an introduction by Laura McCullough, this anthology illuminates Dunn's development as a writer, his thematic obsessions, his strategies and maneuvers on the page, and locates him in the pantheon of essential American poets.
"The Room & the World aptly captures the minute and the far-reaching in Stephen Dunn’s impressive body of work. Laura McCullough has curated and culled essays that accentuate the full breadth and depth of the man, while always holding a critical eye to what matters; these shaped reflections and keen insights direct the reader deeper into Dunn’s poetry, his formal control and philosophical wit which grapples with our everyday lives, and we meet a citizen of acute memory and astute dreaming, a voice that risks profundity. The Room & the World helps us to gauge the man behind an unforgettable language of daily living and imagination."—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Chameleon Couch: Poems
With Foreword by: Dave Smith
The first book of its kind to explore and unpack the Pulitzer winning poet's oeuvre. Including 24 essays, a preface by poet and essayist Dave Smith, and an introduction by Laura McCullough, this anthology illuminates Dunn's development as a writer, his thematic obsessions, his strategies and maneuvers on the page, and locates him in the pantheon of essential American poets.
"The Room & the World aptly captures the minute and the far-reaching in Stephen Dunn’s impressive body of work. Laura McCullough has curated and culled essays that accentuate the full breadth and depth of the man, while always holding a critical eye to what matters; these shaped reflections and keen insights direct the reader deeper into Dunn’s poetry, his formal control and philosophical wit which grapples with our everyday lives, and we meet a citizen of acute memory and astute dreaming, a voice that risks profundity. The Room & the World helps us to gauge the man behind an unforgettable language of daily living and imagination."—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Chameleon Couch: Poems
With Foreword by: Dave Smith
What Men Want
Order it here: XOXOX Press
This is a book of audacious love poems, gutsy pronouncements, accounts of unabashed desire. McCullough crisscrosses personal accounts and societal expectations—she is a bombshell dropping bombshells. -- Denise Duhamel
McCullough confronts the mystery of otherness again and again in husbands, strangers, and sons. Nothing deters this poet from asking the questions she needs to ask in order to crack “the man-code” if she can, and emerge in sympathy on the other side. -- Kurt Brown
McCullough confronts the mystery of otherness again and again in husbands, strangers, and sons. Nothing deters this poet from asking the questions she needs to ask in order to crack “the man-code” if she can, and emerge in sympathy on the other side. -- Kurt Brown
