Always explosive and lit, Fuse burns with the fury of a many-minded intelligence and an ever-expanding heart.—Dean YoungIn his best poems Marc McKee achieves the impossible: his verse is quicker than life. There's a wonderful gallop in these lines. The jetliner of poetry triumphs over local trains of everyday existence.—Adam ZagajewskiHow does one make the ineluctable and changing connections between changing objects and changing people? How does one balance aggressive history with the demanding influx of personal experience? Fuse is an attempt to substitute poems for answers to such questions.

Fuse

Literature & Fiction

McKee, Marc

Poetry

Black Lawrence Press

Poetry. "Hi. You probably don't know me, but this blurb is that moment when you're scanning the back of a book, looking for a hook that will lead you inside to something you really need. But then you realize the person who's written the blurb--me--isn't someone you've ever heard of, or they're not the literary flavor of the week, or maybe you genuinely don't like their work. Maybe you genuinely don't like them...Well, this is that moment, and we've both been here before. It's a little uncomfortable, but often that's the case with things that are true. What I'm saying is...I really need you to read this book, because it is in fact something you really need to read. Really. Please..."--Matt Hart "Imagine, if you will, a robot, a little language machine programmed to process hurt--your exact grief--by naming it, until it has no sting. Imagine an elegy for Phillip Seymour Hoffman delivered from the persona of Phil Parma, Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character in Magnolia, over Phillip Seymour Hoffman's body, like a treatise on hearing and healing another human. If you can imagine the antic mix of Ultra-Talk and artifice, a spiral notebook's wide-open ardor, and POV script filled to the brim with 'lust and shame / and real beauty and the feverish, / trembling trust you get from puppies / or babies, anybody truly new,' you need this book more than you think. Simultaneously searing and sensitively tuned, McKee's fourth collection, META META MAKE-BELIEF is both diagnosis and remedy for 'your despair which is always becoming / another version of itself / or bulging into an altogether / altogether else.'"--Marcus Wicker "We live in a world of illusions selling us further illusions. We grow dizzy and sick with it. This book is a tonic and an art and a hair of the dog, making itself true and truly felt."--Kate Nuernberger

Meta Meta Make-Belief

Poetry. "In Marc McKee's compelling new collection, BEWILDERNESS, it's not the past that's a foreign country but the present—a world rendered strange to us because of the compounding forces of loss and tragedy, but also in the strangeness of ordinary events as seen through 'special goggles' offering always a new vision into the heart of things. This is how the poet's dazzling use of language transforms the world we have experienced into something extraordinary, where understudies rush to the fore/playing characters you recognize/but no longer know."—Natasha Trethewey

Bewilderness

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Poetry. "In CONSOLATIONEER, lines soar beyond their bounds, turning sense into vector and idea to a winged thing. The end of the world comes just before daylight and love is simultaneously particular and apocalyptic, falling down in ashes around us. This is the crisis at its best. CONSOLATIONEER is Marc at his flyest."—Amelia Gray "Marc McKee's superb third collection CONSOLATIONEER is a reminder of why he is one of the most thoughtful and wide-ranging poets putting in work out here. In these intricate poems, McKee holds onto the linguistic wit and musical pleasures of his previous collections, but has learned some other things along the way—about urgency and love, about inevitability and what it means to be on the cusp of permanence. 'Nothing happens. / Which is to say an awful lot very nearly / happens' the speaker of 'Lately Indesolate' tells us. These poems are full of happenings and almost happenings that show us that we are fortunate and full of luxury to be here right now, living in our slim spaces between necessity and beauty."—Adrian Matejka "Nobody writes like Marc McKee. His voice is his own, as is his complexly word-deliberate, irrepressibly inventive manner. The result in CONSOLATIONEER is a concurrently heartbreaking and delightful tour de force. At the heart of this work is a deep passion, an exhilarating intelligence, and—beyond even these uncommon pleasures—an unshakeable compassion. He is our most wise young poet."—Scott Cairns

Consolationeer

Marc McKee's WHAT APOCALYPSE is a tumultuous, exciting, hilarious, bizarre, beautiful, and terrifying high wire act. Winner of the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 2008 Chapbook Contest, this book is singular in its vision and love for / embrace of / terror for all the muchness this world has to offer us. As he writes in "At the Edge of a Deep, Dark Wood, Re-purposed Dolphin Speaks": "So we move in the air of this world / which will cover the dent we made when we leave." Marc McKee earned his MFA from the University of Houston, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. His poems appear in Boston Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, LIt, Pleiades, Salt Hill, and several other places.

What Apocalypse?

New Michigan Press