Women Who Marry Houses

McDougall, Jo

Coyote Love Pr

In these moving poems, Jo McDougall writes of loss -- the loss of her daughter to cancer, as well as the loss of her own childhood in the rural South. The ghost of the past haunts these poems, and so as McDougall moves from pain to joy and finally to a hard-earned serenity, the reader rejoices in her triumph of the spirit.

Dirt: Poems (Poetry Series Volume 4)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Autumn House Pr

Towns Facing Railroads: Poems

". . . a first-rate book of poems full of sad knowledge but richer with wisdom and the earned refinement of art." -George Garrett

University of Arkansas Press

". . . a first-rate book of poems full of sad knowledge but richer with wisdom and the earned refinement of art." -George Garrett

C.D. Wright has said that Jo McDougall writes "a lean stoic line; each poem makes its mark, like spit." With precise clarity McDougall brings to life farmers, dressmakers, widows, and waitresses so that we take part in the strange delights and tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.

From Darkening Porches: Poems

In the Home of the Famous Dead will appeal to newcomers as well as to avid followers of Jo McDougall’s long career and complex work, providing valuable insights to the development of a poet’s signature, inimitable style. This collection presents work known for its sparse, compact language; surprising metaphor; humor; irony; idiomatic speech; and a stoic, sadly earned wisdom concerning death and loss. In McDougall’s world, folks making do with what they have take the stage to speak of, in the words of one critic, “the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.” Her work has been described as having “excruciating honesty” (Gerald Stern), giving voice to the “ineffable emotions of plain people” (Judith Kitchen). Miller Williams notes that the work has “cleanness and clarity . . . in all the funk and smell of humanity.” This is the poetry of midwestern plains and southern botttomlands, of waitresses and professors, farmers and bankers, the disadvantaged and privileged alike. Often beginning in the personal and expanding to the universal, this poet takes note of the phenomenological world with a mixture of joy, despair, and awe, providing a haunting look at the cosmic irony of our existence. McDougall’s style is indescribable, yet wholly accessible. As Kelly Cherry notes, “Call it magic, call it art; either way [Jo McDougall’s work] is something like a miracle.”

In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems

Jo McDougall brings a poet's sensibility to memoir. Recounting five generations of Delta rice farmers, through family archives and oral histories, she traces how the clan made their way into the fabric of America, beginning with her Belgian-immigrant grandfather, a pioneer rice farmer on the Arkansas Delta at the turn of the twentieth century. As John Grisham has for a 1950s Arkansas cotton farm, McDougall illuminates an Arkansas rice farm in the 1930s and 1940s. The Garot family's acreage near DeWitt and the town itself provide the stage for McDougall's wry, compelling, and layered account of the day-to-day of rice growing on the farm that her father inherited. In that setting she discovers a rich "universe of words" in the Great Depression, comes of age during World War II, and finds her way alongside "that whole quirky, compelling cast of characters" that comprised her kin. In this conflicted, ironic, southern-but-universal account of betrayal, heartbreak, loss, and joy, "the vagaries and the grace" of the land join forces with the power of money as family bonds are both forged and dissolved. Deeply felt, unsentimental, and often humorous,Daddy's Money presents McDougall's life and the lives of her relatives in the way that all our lives are eventually framed-as stories. "When all else is lost," the author maintains, "the stories remain."

Daddy’s Money: A Memoir of Farm and Family

History

Americas

Poetry. In her signature economical style, Jo McDougall invites readers into the small towns of the rural South and Midwest and the dramas of their inhabitants. Through her spare, stoic, and at times spectral form of storytelling, she depicts lives limited by privation yet buoyed by dreams. Grief, resignation, awe, death, and joy abide in her work. McDougall is wed to realism, but obliged to invent; it's these inventions that lend her portraits a singular sensitivity and clear-eyed register.

The Undiscovered Room

Tavern Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McDougall, Jo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McDougall, Jo

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McDougall, Jo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Women Who Marry Houses

Dirt: Poems (Poetry Series Volume 4)

Towns Facing Railroads: Poems

Towns Facing Railroads: Poems

From Darkening Porches: Poems

From Darkening Porches: Poems

In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems

In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems

Daddy’s Money: A Memoir of Farm and Family

The Undiscovered Room