Mz N: the serial
A Poem-in-Episodes
ISBN10: 0374537054
ISBN13: 9780374537050
Trade Paperback
128 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.99
The acclaimed poet, memoirist, and essayist Maureen N. McLane here charts a new path into vital genre-bending territories. Not a verse novel, not a verse memoir, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes offers something else—"life . . . a continual allegory" (to invoke Keats): a life intense, episodic, female, sexual, philosophical, romantic, analytic. Tracking the growth of one poet's mind, switchbacking its way through American English, Mz N toggles between story and song. This is a poetry both "furious / & alive."
Alive to the lash of love, the longueurs of adolescence, the limits of identity, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes is a bravura experiment in life-writing—an assaying, a testing, a transforming, an honoring of the tentative and the torqued. What is it to be contemporary, to be "one / among other ones" in a "cracking world"? How does a body vibrate into being? How is a mind made out of other minds? Seizing the queer realities of any life, Mz N explores how one is surprised, seduced, and struck into speech, thought, song, silence. "Then, what is life?" cried Shelley. So too Mz N.
Reviews
Praise for Mz N: the serial
"McLane is a poet of control. While the world in her viewfinder seems to be wobbling on its axis . . . McLane renders each phrase with the precise and steady hand of an ice sculptor. Her consummate finesse can be a source of delight."—Jeff Gordinier, The New York Times Book Review
"Freewheeling and yet intricately stitched, full of multilayered tonalities, [McLane's] are poems that will make you laugh, cry and think in swift succession, or all at once."—Sarah Howe, Prac Crit
"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. She can be confessional and clinical and ludic—sometimes all in the same sentence. What I'm trying to say is that McLane has moves."—Parul Sehgal, Bookforum