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Like moonlight, McCann’s attention gives weird clarity and an alien glow to post-industrial landscapes and human interiors. These poems are startling and irreverent, but also emotional and approachable. They uncivilize us into seeing the world as both ruin and possibility: “It was danger/ gave them life/ but damage/ makes us shine.”
Anthony McCann is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His books include I Heart Your Fate, Moongarden, and Father of Noise. He lives in Los Angeles.
Price: $12.00
Pages: 88
Publisher: Wave Books
Imprint: Wave Books
Publication Date:
01 April 2006
Trim Size: 8.00 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9781933517025
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
"Anthony McCann wants to achieve greatness, and he wants to do it with the grunting brute-force of a wildebeest. Moongarden, the Brooklyn poet’s second book, is full of strong poems, strong images, and strong mammals.... Beasts are scholarly to the extent that scholars are beastly; in essence all mammals are beasts, regardless of the habits that define them. ...The impulse behind fusing the intelligent and the animal is evident early on in Moongarden; it’s an impulse to access one’s inherent mindlessness, one’s plain being."
–John Deming, Coldfront
"For my money, the best books of poems generate spontaneous and unexpected language use in a reader—such as the work of the Spanish surrealists, some language poets and a few of our younger, contemporary poets. Anthony McCann’s Moongarden is one such example, delightfully dredging the sludge of our atrophied linguistic centers to free language for new associations and joys."
–Tom Dvorske, H_NGM_N
"A level of intrigue rarely seen or experienced in contemporary poetry. The strength of the poems in this collection rests on McCann’s ability to entice by setting up events and locations, then fracturing the narrative, allowing shadows to fan out upon the walls. The poet works for and against the shadowy, fine line that distinguishes man from beast and beast from man."
–Steven R. Karl, LIT Review
"Anthony McCann’s second and most recent book, Moongarden, is as coolly atmospheric as its title suggests. McCann’s lyricism is gelid, surreal, and eerie; in “October,” for instance, he writes, “beneath the park / a globe of ice is growing / shot through // with milky flaws,” creating a landscape that is more than winter bleakness. He also gives us moments of comic relief; in “October,” the “trees / raise their squirrelly fists.” Throughout Moongarden, McCann’s combination of surrealism, absurdity, and repetition of imagery results in a work that expertly embodies contradiction. The poems are cohesively fragmented, the whole book drawn together by a schizophrenic grace."
–Evan J. Peterson, The Southeast Review
"Be it shifts between the real and the ephemeral or sincerity and irony, Moongarden is ultimately about being caught in transition, and what a beautiful and horrible place it can be."
–Rebecca Guyon, Galatea Resurrects
–John Deming, Coldfront
"For my money, the best books of poems generate spontaneous and unexpected language use in a reader—such as the work of the Spanish surrealists, some language poets and a few of our younger, contemporary poets. Anthony McCann’s Moongarden is one such example, delightfully dredging the sludge of our atrophied linguistic centers to free language for new associations and joys."
–Tom Dvorske, H_NGM_N
"A level of intrigue rarely seen or experienced in contemporary poetry. The strength of the poems in this collection rests on McCann’s ability to entice by setting up events and locations, then fracturing the narrative, allowing shadows to fan out upon the walls. The poet works for and against the shadowy, fine line that distinguishes man from beast and beast from man."
–Steven R. Karl, LIT Review
"Anthony McCann’s second and most recent book, Moongarden, is as coolly atmospheric as its title suggests. McCann’s lyricism is gelid, surreal, and eerie; in “October,” for instance, he writes, “beneath the park / a globe of ice is growing / shot through // with milky flaws,” creating a landscape that is more than winter bleakness. He also gives us moments of comic relief; in “October,” the “trees / raise their squirrelly fists.” Throughout Moongarden, McCann’s combination of surrealism, absurdity, and repetition of imagery results in a work that expertly embodies contradiction. The poems are cohesively fragmented, the whole book drawn together by a schizophrenic grace."
–Evan J. Peterson, The Southeast Review
"Be it shifts between the real and the ephemeral or sincerity and irony, Moongarden is ultimately about being caught in transition, and what a beautiful and horrible place it can be."
–Rebecca Guyon, Galatea Resurrects
Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of I Heart Your Fate (Wave Books, 2011), Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006), and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). In addition to these two collections, he is one of the authors of Gentle Reader! (2007), a book of erasures of the English Romantics, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. He has taught English as a Second Language in the former Czechoslovakia, South Korea and Nicaragua, as well as in New York City. Currently he lives in Los Angeles, where he works with Machine Project and teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts.