Poetry. "Most poets seem to write poetry with the will, relentlessly suppressing every part of themselves that isn't ecstatic. Mary Mackey writes as a whole person-mind and senses-and the poems are marvelous"—Dennis Nurkse. Mackey's new collection of poems, BREAKING THE FEVER, extends Mackey's published works to 11 novels and 5 books of poetry. "The poetry in BREAKING THE FEVER offers truths both personal and political, visions both actual and imaginatively broad. Ranging in setting from her childhood Indianapolis to a Brazilian favela, in subject from ecological tragedy to marital passion to the thoughts of a thoroughly contemporary Leda, Mary Mackey's crisp-edged perceptions are set down in this new collection of poems with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly unflinching eye"—Jane Hirshfield.
Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA
Mary Mackey received a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The University of Michigan. Her published works include six collections of poetry, including BREAKING THE FEVER (Marsh Hawk Press, 2006) and SUGAR ZONE (Marsh Hawk Press, 2011) and twelve novels. Her poems have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Dennis Nurkse, Ron Hansen, Dennis Schmitz, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Three times Garrison Keillor has featured her poetry on his program The Writer's Almanac. Mackey's work has been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. She is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Sacramento. For the last twenty years she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband, Angus Wright, who writes about land reform and environmental issues. At present she is working on a series of poems inspired by the works of Brazilian poets and novelists. Combining Portuguese and English, she creates poems that use Portuguese as incantation to evoke the lyrical space that lies at the conjunction between Portuguese and English.
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Laurel Johnson @ Galatea Resurrects