Anthony McCann seeks out the elusive Other with all the raucous self-loathing of a mad saint. Eroticized, debunked, adored, and despised, the sayer of these incantations ventures with appropriate fearfulness into the known, buoyed only by the persistence of the body in its current manifestation. His penetrating, pervasive doubt lends a perverse clarity to the journey.

Father of Noise

Biographies & Memoirs

MCCANN, Anthony

Historical

Fence Books

Los Angeles Times Bestseller
An “epic exploration” of the 2016 right-wing Oregon Occupation―"an excellent microcosm by which we might better understand our difficult national history and distressing political moment” (Maggie Nelson).
In 2016, a group of armed, divinely inspired right-wing protestors led by Ammon Bundy occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Encamped in the shadowlands of the republic, insisting that the Federal government had no right to own public land, the occupiers were seen by a divided country as either dangerous extremists dressed up as cowboys, or as heroes insisting on restoring the rule of the Constitution. From the Occupation’s beginnings, to the trials of the occupiers in federal court in downtown Portland and their tumultuous aftermaths, Shadowlands is the resonant, multifaceted story of one of the most dramatic flashpoints in the year that gave us Donald Trump.
Sharing the expansive stage with the occupiers are a host of others―Native American tribal leaders, public-lands ranchers, militia members, environmentalists, federal defense attorneys, and Black Lives Matter activists―each contending in their different ways with the meaning of the American promise of Liberty. Gathering into its vortex the realities of social media technology, history, religion, race, and the environment―this piercing work by Anthony McCann offers us a combination of beautiful writing and high-stakes analysis of our current cultural and political moment. Shadowlands is a clarifying, exhilarating story of a nation facing an uncertain future and a murky past in a time of great collective reckoning.

Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff

History

Americas

Bloomsbury Publishing

Moongarden

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.

Literature & Fiction

United States

Wave Books

"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.

I Heart Your Fate

"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 ReviewThing 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 afternoontakes each belly in its handslifts it up towards some glassand all that's insideWhile he crawled onwith his bodytowards vengeanceor the stateAnthony 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.

Thing Music

Poetry

Thing Music (Wave Books)

I Am The Dead, Who, You Take Care of Me

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