
Previously Owned
Nathan McClain
(Author)Description
Product Details
Publisher | Four Way Books |
Publish Date | September 15, 2022 |
Pages | 120 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781954245266 |
Dimensions | 8.9 X 5.9 X 0.4 inches | 0.5 pounds |
About the Author
Nathan McClain was born and raised in the lower desert of Southern California. He is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Guesthouse, The Common, and The Critical Flame, among others. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literary Arts at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.
Reviews
-Tommye Blount
"Nathan McClain's Previously Owned is no-nonsense, meat and potatoes, good gotdam poetry. Careful readers will appreciate how exquisitely crafted are his lines, how resonant his images, how thoughtful his progressions. What's more, McClain's second volume shows us a writer who, like Robert Hayden before him, neither ignores nor is encumbered by his country's complicated history. His topics range widely and the whole of the human landscape--physical, psychological--is his, and ours, for the roaming."
-John Murillo
"The opening poem of Nathan McClain's Previously Owned operates like the legend of a map, a key to the book's existential topography. The poem's presenting subject is a Roman sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, or 'not pulling / rather, about to pull.' McClain addresses the self via the second person, and draws in the reader, too, as observer: 'and here you / are, looking, ' witness to the boy's 'insistent grief.' 'And what // have you learned from / standing here so long examining pain?' Previously Owned exists in this incremental space-the about to pull, the almost, the grief, the tenderness, the examination, and the distance. It's a masterstroke in a masterful collection, in which a speaker of a nuanced intelligence and lush interiority reflects upon the American landscape, its pastoral and judicial and historical duplicity entwined with racial alienation and violence. McClain has written a collection of sculptural artfulness-through which the thorn of grief thrums still."
-Diane Seuss
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