Joshua McKinney's debut collection of poetry, Saunter, shows immense devotion to and passion for language in all its aspects. He intensely attends to words and delights in the play of accidental connections and complications. Such amusement and playfulness with oppositions is evidenced in lines like: "an opening / a cello scales / some stairs. Risen, / a thought falls." McKinney's awareness of the complex resonance of literary history and current issues of language comes through in his dedication to making the appearance of language, not just its sound or its relative meaning, an integral aspect of his poems. Meanwhile, the subject matter is often surprisingly mythic and mysterious, championing absolute freedom and wildness. His intricate verse is sincere in its observations while turning inward on itself, sauntering in designed indirection.

Saunter: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry Ser.)

Literature & Fiction

McKinney, Joshua

Poetry

University of Georgia Press

Poetry. Winner of the Dorothy Brunsman poetry prize. "These handsomely-crafted poems are remarkable--not only for their intelligence and use of language, but for their blend of sensitivity and strength. On his journey to recover the 'lost child,' Joshua McKinney's belief in innocence never wavers. At the same time, he gives dignity to boyhood's time and place, and those who inhabit it...THE NOVICE MOURNER is an achievement in that it truly demonstrates how grief can give way to a celebration of life"--Judith Minty.

The Novice Mourner

Bear Star Press

Free Verse Editions Edited by Jon Thompson
More than any American poet now, Joshua McKinney is devoted to origins. A conservator of first things, an enthusiast for those early syllables brooding upon the compass-rose of language, he counsels joy, and he calls forth colors from a breath of air. In our disconsolate republic, Small Sillion constitutes a miracle. These poems are true partisans. --Donald Revell
Joshua McKinney is a poet of keenest attunement. In Small Sillion he plows furrows in unattended, taken-for-granted scapes of land and mind to discover the wonder of "something/sacred something wholly/mundane." This poet's tensile attention balances at the boundary of language and witness, grappling with the ways that language is incommensurate with experience. McKinney's poetry nonetheless ventures farther, both sensuous and otherworldly: his is a lyricism "aware as the nerve current sang in its flesh" that tenderly, gracefully pursues fulfillment "without knowing the nature of what it points to." --Elizabeth Robinson
Its every line worked into shine by the poet's meticulous ear, Joshua McKinney's Small Sillion is devotion enacted: a vow to make the work of words matter, to make words into matter, by attending to the world with acute attention and tender care. Like the singular singing of Gerard Manley Hopkins, these meticulously sculpted poems attempt to render visible the invisible by enfleshing the word with "the phenomenon of pungent sound," limning the inscapes suggested by encounters with birds and trees and other emissaries of life outside of human language and consciousness. To truly encounter the otherness alive outside us and to write of it, to persist in such endeavors--these are acts whose faith is born of an unusual openness, the poet "aware as the nerve current sang in its flesh." How quickly the mundane opens out onto otherwise in these loving lyrics that bring "each creature//inside the soul//of our own flesh." --Brian Teare
In his luminous fourth collection, Joshua McKinney harvests the threads of his affection to loving fruition. Via poems indebted to the ground--that increasingly denuded and over ploughed place we call the earth--the poet tenderly graphs the region of our ultimate dispossession and somehow makes it feel like home. Both rooted and rootless, and always in the midst of what can be seen or sung, these poems seek "Something joyful, something woeful as the oldest sound. . . ."  Small Sillion is the Book of Psalms for the 21st century. --Claudia Keelan

Small Sillion (Free Verse Editions)

Parlor Press

The poems in Mad Cursive move gracefully between beauty and destruction, the essential real locale of poetry in our times. A mad swordsman inside a poet-seer, McKinney dares to locate what resembles, in my reading, spirit laid bare. In this truly elegant book, the remnant of our language negotiates a shadow world-that space between life and death-which is life on this earth. "Inside sword we find word," indeed. A truly courageous book. -Claudia Keelan, author of Missing Her

Mad Cursive

Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC

Sad Animal

Gunpowder Press