Pattie McCarthy

Poetry. Women's Studies. "Pattie McCarthy's meticulously researched wifthing sequence traverses history's gaps and silences throughout the medieval English vocabularies she has always been drawn to. Beginning with the fourteenth century English mystic Margery Kempe who wrote through spirit dictation, WIFTHING scours vows of chastity, devotions, pregnant queens, cross-dressing heretics, goodwives, births, daugherthings, boychiks, court records, kaleidoscopic New England witchcraft testimonies. McCarthy's ear is sharp, her eye, demanding and disciplined. Eighty unpunctuated sonnets, both austere and rebellious, are carefully arranged on each page as verbal grid maps through pre- and postmodernity. Small things, various hagiographies, fabric [Latin textus], piecework syntax, 'The goodwyf will call you back.' Through threads and threats of mothering history the intercession of love pardoned and restored with fury and reverence." --Susan Howe

Wifthing

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

Jennifer L. Knox

Kirsten Kaschock

Peter Davis

Shanna Compton

Danielle Pafunda

Sandra Simonds

Bloof Books

Jennifer Tamayo

Jared White

Becca Klaver

Elizabeth Workman

Hailey Higdon

Book of Bloof (a Sampler).

Poetry. "Pattie McCarthy's QUIET BOOK keeps its steady gaze trained on the mother/child unit—from the inside out and back in again. In gorgeous poems of formal range and daring, McCarthy gives us birth and motherhood like no other writer—she is unafraid, she is wry and at times she is deeply tender. This is the 'everyday opera' of real life: the drama of bodies as matter of fact, the essential material of being human. In the book's third and brilliant section, a series of ekphrastic poems on mostly fifteenth and sixteenth paintings of women and children remind us that the breast, the mouth, the food, the hands, the labor—these attributes of human life are indeed timeless. We look at the past to find ourselves, and what we find in ourselves is exhaustion, which is love, which is power."—Julie Carr "If the body is the soul, what of that to which a body gives birth? Pattie McCarthy's remarkable QUIET BOOK interrogates what is made, what is received, and what is unknown. Charting English as 'a daughter language,' McCarthy skillfully tracks etymologies, figurations, images, forms, and functions of the feminine as bodily experience and as aesthetic encounter. This brilliantly moving collection challenges our received grammars of representation and calls for a reinvention of our domestic spaces, a recalibration of our collective interiority."—Tonya Foster

Quiet Book

Pattie McCarthy

Books

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