More Anon: Selected Poems

by Maureen N. McLane

Overview

Selected poems of Maureen N. McLane

More Anon gathers a selection of poems from Maureen N. McLane’s critically acclaimed first five books of poetry.

McLane, whose 2014 collection This Blue was a finalist for the National Book Award, is a poet of wit and play, of romanticism and intellect, of song and polemic. More Anon presents her work anew. The poems spark with life, and the concentrated selection showcases her energy and style.

As Parul Seghal wrote in Bookforum, “To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. Hers is a roving, amphibious intelligence; she’s at home in the essay and the fragment, the polemic and the elegy.” In More Anon, McLane—a poet, scholar, and prizewinning critic—displays the full range of her vertiginous mind and daring experimentation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374601997
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	07/20/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	469 KB

About the Author

Maureen N. McLane is the author of several previous books of poetry, including Some Say; Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes; and the 2014 National Book Award finalist This Blue. Her book My Poets, a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.
Maureen N. McLane's books of poems include More Anon, Some Say, Mz N: the serial, and the 2014 National Book Award finalist This Blue. Her book My Poets, a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in New York.

Table of Contents

envoi

FROM SAME LIFE (2008)
were fragments enough . . .
Catechism
after sappho IV
after sappho V
Terrible things are happening / in Russian novels! . . .
Excursion Susan Sontag
From Mz N: the serial
Letter from Paris
Poem (“As a man may go to Costco . . .”)
regional
Core Samples
syntax
I wanted to crawl inside a middle voice . . .

FROM WORLD ENOUGH (2010)
Passage I
L.A.
Saratoga August
Haunt
Songs of a Season II
Au Revoir
Anthropology
Life Study
Song of the Last Meeting
Songs of the South

FROM THIS BLUE (2014)
A Situation
Aviary
Summer Beer with Endangered Glacier
All Good
What’s the Matter
OK Fern
Tell Us What Happened After We Left
That Man
They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century
Genoa
Ice People, Sun People
Terran Life
Replay / Repeat
Horoscope
Quiet Car
Enough with the Swan Song

FROM MZ N: THE SERIAL: A POEM-IN-EPISODES (2016)
PROEM: Mz N Contemporary
Mz N Nothing
Mz N Triumph of Life
Mz N Highschool Boyfriend
Mz N No Permanent Mind
Mz N Hater
Mz N Thirteenth Floor
Mz N Therapy
Mz N Baby
Mz N Woman
Mz N Moon
Mz N Palinode

FROM SOME SAY (2017)
OK Let’s Go
Mesh
Some Say
Forest
Taking a Walk in the Woods After Having Taken a Walk in the Woods with You
The relativity
Prospect
Peony
White Dress
For You
Crux / Fern Park
One Canoe
Girls in Bed
On Not Being Elizabethan
Headphones
Against the Promise of a View
Night Sky

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

envoi: eclipse

Editorial Reviews

06/21/2021

This strong collection assembles poems from McLane’s first five books, presenting the work of a poet who locates the past in the present and revels in language’s power to transgress limitations. In “Letter from Paris,” McLane playfully deconstructs the Enlightenment: “I am drawing up an indictment/ of the French/ & Reason/ & Human Rights/ which begins by unlinking these concepts/ and concludes in weeping.” McLane delights in collapsing high and low linguistic registers, as in her abecedarian poem “Poem”: “As a man may go to Costco,/ Buy the jumbo pak of diapers, double liters of/ Coke and Diet Coke and a sixpack and stock up on/ Doritos and Cheetos and/ Eveready batteries, so I perhaps/ Formless in the vast republic/ Grasp the metaphysical thing, commodity, crucially desired/ Hologram of national intent.” Yet underlying McLane’s poems is a sense that society’s relationship to the world around it is permeable and fantastically spontaneous: “Every time/ I collide with your mind/ I give off—/ something happens—/ we don’t know what/ Particles, articles/ this bit, a bit/ digital, simple/ fission, fusion/ —a great vowel shift.” This collection shines with a wonderful mix of irreverence and profundity. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"This collection shines with a wonderful mix of irreverence and profundity." —Publishers Weekly

"Poet and critic James Longenbach has described a certain kind of poem that 'makes us hear [it] as an ongoing act of thinking, a bringing forth.' Maureen McLane’s poems achieve this bringing-forth, showing the mind (and the body, since for McLane the two can’t be separated) as 'an irresistible humming vibrating' thing, 'all present-tense,' 'a congeries / of possibles' . . . [McLane's] poems are learned but they’re also fun, sometimes goofy, and they’re always moving, moving, moving." —Anthony Domestico, Commonweal

"Reprinting around a third of her previously published poetry, More Anon may be 'rigorously pruned,' but its contents are so various, no mere bouquet but a botanical garden, that you might reasonably wonder how it all came from just one poet." —Christopher Spaide, The Sewanee Review

"More Anon dazzles for the fineness of McLane’s formal precision, her searching intellectualism, and her commitment to ethical questioning and growth. She theorizes her sense of identity as ongoing, as never not emergent, as the shifting sum of a set of possible performances. 'There are many questions I have been brought to pose to myself,' she writes in a recent essay on contemporary poetics." —Gillian White, Poetry

"McLane's poems are about as social and intelligent as they come . . . McLane has already gathered her sticks, now she sharpens them. This proves a conclusive asset; there is nothing like her in American poetry." —Spencer Hupp, The Cortland Review

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