Choragus

McCarthy, Pattie

Elmwood Ct:; Potes & Poets Press Inc. ,; 1998

Poetry. This is the first full-length collection by Pattie McCarthy who co-founded and edits BeautifulSwimmer Press. "Playing inventive variations on the medieval book of hours, this marvelous collection swarms with vividly open language that suddenly gathers to moments of startling clarity. This is simply a gorgeous book --Cole Swensen. "Pattie McCarthy commands attention for her elegant sensibility, her intellectual acuity, and her discerning creation of a poetic language adequate to the complex pressures and insights she meticulously illuminates" --Rachel Blau DuPlessis. McCarthy's chapbook CHORAGUS is also available from SPD.

Bk of (H)rs

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Apogee Press

Poetry. "In Pattie McCarthy's wonderful new collection, NULLS, we are compelled to consider a collage of possible meetings which ultimately lead to birth-the birth of the poem, the birth of assumption, the birth of identity, and the birth of expectations and restraints which press upon any person with the aspiration to decode domestic entropy and to deftly shepherd living form. With urgency you will be asked, 'WHO SAYS THAT WOLVES ARE BAD MOTHERS?' and 'DO YOU HAVE YOUR EXHAUSTION LETTER?' McCarthy's asking is hypnotic, acute and probes discrete categories of collapse. NULLS beautifully demonstrates how iteration can become palimpsest, how 'invisible ink' may 'make your mouth noun' and how interrogation can cause fracture. NULLS provides proof that texts can change the dimensions of mental space and transmute or reveal the inaudible which exists alongside any transcription."—Laynie Browne

Nulls

Horse Less Press

Poetry. "In Pattie McCarthy's MARYBONES, the vision of Mary so proliferates that the frame of personhood (really, womanhood) stretches within the poems, demonstrating 'the difference between unknown & anon.' McCarthy makes a fascinating study of the dividing—infinitely dividing—subjectivity of the Mary who is virgin, mother, queen, Irish cook, children's rhyme, ship, or one of the millions of Marys so named between 1880 and 1948 when it was the most popular name for a girl. In one telling phrase, McCarthy writes simply 'Mary I find.' Thus these poems acutely, poignantly, wryly search the shifting distance between witness and presence itself. To follow MARYBONES through this seeking and finding is abundantly satisfying: a conversation, a conversion, a version. Here, the sense of identity as static is transformed into 'an act of glow.'"—Elizabeth Robinson"Pattie McCarthy's MARYBONES powerfully evokes—and invokes—the iconic, implacable mother-of-god Everywoman who is always slippping out of canonical reach. The rosary was once a handful of bones; it used to be flowers. In this gorgeous enunciation of annunciations, Mary touches the singular with the universal, an open signifier of unwritten and unmarried mothers. She is the S. S. Mary, the Santa Maria, a casualty of unknown forces, an early American, a boat full of immigrants, a survivor of hard labor. McCarthy lovingly draws all of her into the refuge of this amazing book."—Elizabeth Willis"From painting to literature to lullabies, through seminal figures, religious iconography, and those whose anonymity is broken only by their shared namesake, Pattie McCarthy's MARYBONES braids the images, anecdotes, representations, and interpretations of the lives of the many women who've gone by the name of Mary into a book that is at once an ekphrastic historiography and an investigation of motherhood. Here, the poet is collector, collaborator, researcher, and re-enactor, all the while careful not to jostle the infant sleeping in her lap. If, as Gertrude Stein tells us, 'Mary could be a color,' then McCarthy's book-length poem deploys it in everything from wide arcs to pointillist precision, illuminating the shade of the present by filling in the skeletal details of our public and private pasts."—Noah Eli Gordon

marybones

A poetry chapbook that reflects on shifting time and tides through the language of the shoreline. Pattie McCarthy's extraordinary tides occupies a space in the intertidal, the in-between place of not-quite-land and not-quite-sea. The poems reflect on passing time, fluctuating tides, and on our efforts to predict both. Upon a ground that is always in flux beneath us, McCarthy invites us to question if and how we really know where we are. Considering the language of the tides, the poems in this chapbook make a wrackline palimpsest, a seastruck archive, a marginalia of the littoral. McCarthy's&nbsp;extraordinary tides&nbsp;is the winner of the 2021 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, chosen by Rae Armantrout.

extraordinary tides

Omnidawn