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In just five lines, Jo McDougall can make you shudder. Her poems are often as stark and open as their settings - the Kansas plains and Southern bottomlands. But in these wide fields and hot kitchens, on these front porches where ordinary people tell their stories, the everyday becomes fabled, truth becomes hallowed. To C. D. Wright, McDougall writes "a lean, stoic line; each poem makes its mark, like spit." In those lines, McDougall brings to life farmers, dressmakers, widows, and waitresses with such precise clarity that we take part in the strange delights, the struggles, the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.
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.
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...
This limited-edition pamphlet showcases 6 haunting new poems by the noted poet and memoirist.
Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Ralph Adamo -- Betty Adcock -- Claudia Emerson Andrews -- James Applewhite -- Alvin Aubert -- Gerald Barrax -- John Bensko -- Wendell Berry -- David Bottoms -- Cathy Smith Bowers -- Van K. Brock -- Jack Butler -- Turner Cassity -- Fred Chappell -- Stephen Corey -- Kate Daniels -- James Dickey -- R.H.W. Dillard -- Maudelle Driskell -- George Garrett -- Margaret Gibson -- R.S. Gwynn -- Jim Hall -- Andrew Hudgins -- T.R. Hummer -- Mark Jarman -- Rodney Jones -- Donald Justice -- Etheridge Knight -- Yusef Komunyakaa -- Rick Lott -- Susan Ludvigson -- Everette Maddox -- Cleopatra Mathis -- Walter McDonald -- Jo McDougall -- Heather Ross Miller -- Jim Wayne Miller -...
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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...
In just five lines, Jo McDougall can make you shudder. Her poems are often as stark and open as their settings - the Kansas plains and Southern bottomlands. But in these wide fields and hot kitchens, on these front porches where ordinary people tell their stories, the everyday becomes fabled, truth becomes hallowed. To C. D. Wright, McDougall writes "a lean, stoic line; each poem makes its mark, like spit". In those lines, McDougall brings to life farmers, dressmakers, widows, and waitresses with such precise clarity that we take part in the strange delights, the struggles, the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.
In everything we have to understand, poetry can help. Tony Hoagland, Harper's , April 2013 In Poem Central: Word Journeys with Readers and Writers , Shirley McPhillips helps us better understand the central role poetry can play in our personal lives and in the life of our classrooms. She introduces us to professional poets, teachers, and students----people of different ages and walks of life---who are actively engaged in reading and making poems. Their stories and their work show us the power of poems to illuminate the ordinary, to nurture, inspire and stand alongside us for the journey. Poem Central is divided into three main parts-;weaving poetry into our lives and our classrooms, reading ...