The Beasts That Vanish

Literature & Fiction

Maginnes, Al

United States

Blue Horse Press

Remarkable for their dark, sharp wit, their stylistic unity, and their combination of sweetness and risk, the poems in The Light in Our Houses probe the intersection of public and private history, and visit the way stories are told: “what we have named history / was once only the braided rivers / of people’s lives, currents that brimmed / fast and dangerous, then emptied / into the wide blank spill of ocean.” Voicing a disdain for conclusions ― “the gaudy clothes we wrap narrative in” ― Al Maginnes writes poems that carry the weight of parables.

The Light in Our Houses: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Poetry

Pleiades Press

“Al Maginnes effortlessly merges the experimental and the metaphysical, the erotic and the spiritual. His wit, humor, and command of metaphor far surpass the fashionable, talky cynicism of his contemporaries.”—Peter JohnsonThe speakers of these poems find themselves “coming to our destination / from the wrong direction.” And because we arrive from the wrong direction, we must witness the ruins of landscapes and people. Yet each of these catastrophes is balanced by the understanding that humans are contradictory creatures, capable of creating beauty as well as chaos.Al Maginnes is the author of several collections of poetry. He teaches at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Ghost Alphabet (White Pine Press Poetry Prize, 13)

White Pine Press

The muted strength of Al Maginnes’s Inventing Constellations is remarkable. Like stars, these poems glow with ancient energy; their quietness belies the power that lies beneath their surface.

Inventing Constellations

Cherry Grove Collections

"Like songs on an old record, Al Maginnes' Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift has the feel of revelation and a call to arms after revelation. They are the captain's log of one who sees past shape-shifting triumph. One after another, these generous-spirited poems treat the reader like a complicit friend, like an accomplice or confederate, a coworker-partner who has learned the skill of seeing what needs to be accomplished. The windfall change Maginnes spends on jukeboxes and pinball in 'The Day Patty Hearst Was Captured' is currency and passport to a country both fearsome and fervently personal, an America of joy and disappointment and shit-wage transactions that, nonetheless, seem to have the power to redeem. This book is stunning for its many revelations, as in the poem 'Vulture Skull,' where we hear of a 'dark / that hosts both what is foul in us / and any spark of infinity we might own' or in the magnificent final poem 'Hard Luck: A Requiem for Jerry Quarry'-gem-like, the poems open the heart-eye in rooms of light and living shadows. Of course there is music playing. Always-and-forever music."-Roy Bentley, finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City

Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift

Literary

Redhawk Publications

In his new & selected Fellow Survivors Al Maginnes is a poet summing up. Early on in this radiant collection (in the poem "Thirty Years of Teaching. No Sabbatical") we hear: "In the end / there will be a roster / of things undone, but somewhere / someone might recall an afternoon when / I said something I had not known / until I said it, a twist of thought / that became true when words found it." Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Charles Bukowski and others make appearances, as if the narrative of a life is nothing if not peopled by a sky of personality-stars whose work infiltrates Maginnes' great storytelling. And there is always his reaction to "the infinite stories that go on / being told for the love of their telling," as in this set of lines from "Salt, Fire, What Comes After" "...what followed / and what lay ahead, waiting for another taste / of the salt-rich blood, the tears I bore / into this world I could not vanish from or flee." The guy's a rocker. Someone I trust the way I've trusted others who earned that designation the way you earn your face: one line at a time with always one more at the margins. So many favorites in this generous, high-spirited volume, but I'd be amiss if I didn't single out "Elegy With Clifford Brown Playing Trumpet"-"the body held fast inside / the skin of the moment." -A finalist for the Miller Williams prize, Roy Bentley has published ten books of poetry. His latest collection, Beautiful Plenty, is available from Main Street Rag.Ravings from Al Maginnes readers from previous books: From George Looney: "Al Maginnes weaves together stories and his own brand of extended figurative tropes to construct poems that speak wisely and with the authenticity of this world in which none of us are 'fully hauned or forgiven.' These poems find beauty and solace in the idea that despite everything we can remain 'willing/ to disk burning and drowning at the same time' just to be here, experiencing this place and imagining the next, where lovemaking might offer 'one way of resolving time' and each of us can hope to be or become 'a player silent with the possibility of song.'From Philip Terman: 'In collection after collection Maginnes' poetry digs deeper into his passions-for family, for com-munity, for labor, for loss and love. The poems in The Next Place demonstrate depth of understand-ing amd empathy with a breadth of reference that can intimately inhabit Shakespeare and New-town, the cosmos and 'the last dive in town.' These poems represent the best of what contempo-rary poetry can offer, and these are poems of not only a grown man, but a good man.'Sandy Longhorn: 'These poems may zoom in on the "small matters: of daily life, but Al Maginnes asks the big ques-tions, questions of what a person leaves behind during a lifetime. In these poems of cemeteries, funeral pyres, fatherhood, and sobriety we encounter harbingers, ghosts, obituaries, and prayers. We are reminded that 'the myth says// we all get one more chance.'Ron Rash: 'To read the poems of Al Maginnes is to encounter an acrobat of consciousness. His poems' swerves and leaps delight and amaze, but most of all they sound the depths of the human heart.'Claudia Emerson: 'Al Maginnes situates himself in the middle of things, the poet's voice mature and contemplative, able to articulate in finely wrought poems the various ways "we are worn away by the things that shape us.' This is a wise book, beautifully rendering "in the impossible cursive of the world" both known and unknown.'

Fellow Survivors: New and Collected Poems

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