Previously Owned
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In his daring sophomore collection, Nathan McClain interrogates his speaker’s American heritage, history, and responsibility. Investigating myth, popular culture, governance, and more, Previously Owned connects a villanelle cataloging Sisyphus’s circular workflow to a Die Hard persona poem critiquing police brutality and joins complex pastorals to the stunning sequence entitled “They said I was an alternate,” which recounts the author’s experience serving on jury duty. Though McClain’s muscular lyric explores a wide range of topics, the intensity of his attention and the profundity of his care remain constant-the final page describes a young girl in a diner, ringing the bell at the host stand, “just to hear it sing, the same / song, the only song // it knows.” Insofar as this collection scrutinizes one’s own culpability and responsibility in this country, interested in the natural world and beauty, as well as what beauty distracts us from, it does so in the hopes of reimagining inheritance, of leaving our children a different song.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McClain's insightful second collection (after Scale) interrogates myths of American life. These richly lyrical poems build slowly toward resolutions or eschew them in favor of lingering between reality and imagined ideals. In "The World is Full," the speaker sees what he initially imagines is a wolf (but is actually a coyote) prowling outside the chicken coop in the backyard; when the speaker overcomes his fear and goes outside, he finds not only dead chickens but also a cold truth: "I believed/ I could save them, or that saving them/ meant I loved them, that my love was good/ for something." Employing a circular syntax, "The Sentence" accumulates clauses in a way that suggests multiple meanings simultaneously: "A him may function/ as a subject, but that depends/ upon the sentence, i.e., A man/ is subject to his sentence." A series of poems titled "They said I was an alternate" considers the speaker's experience of jury duty as indicative of the absurdities of the criminal justice system, leading him to wonder "if it wasn't just another story/ without consequence." McClain's poetry has a fablelike quality, asking the reader to see beyond stories that comfort in order to look honestly at the world. These are accomplished and stirring pieces.
