Description
Poetry. "In SUGAR ZONE Mary Mackey takes you on a fascinating journey to the interior, somewhere between Saint Theresa's Inner Castle and the thicket of Eros—but also a place of desperate actuality, even if it is 'on the other side of the world.' Mackey joins other visionary poets of dépaysement—Henri Michaux in Asia, John Ash in Anatolia, Sharon Doubiago in Peru, Lorca in Manhattan. But Mackey really seems to recover a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forró, and death. Please read 'Cold Snap'; who but Mackey could have written it? SUGAR ZONE authoritatively creates a language and a culture; but the lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home."—Dennis Nurkse
Author Bio
Mary Mackey received a BA from Harvard and a PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of Michigan. Her published works include eight collections of poetry, four from Marsh Hawk Press—THE JAGUARS THAT PROWL OUR DREAMS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1974 TO 2018 (2018), TRAVELERS WITH NO TICKET HOME (2014), SUGAR ZONE (2011), and BREAKING THE FEVER (2006)—and fourteen novels, one of which made The New York Times Bestseller list. She is the winner of the 2012 Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Featured four times on The Writer's Almanac, her poems have been praised by Maxine Hong Kingston, Wendell Berry, Jane Hirsfield, D. Nurkse, Ron Hansen, Dennis Schmitz, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Mackey's works have been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. A co-founder of the Feminist Writers Guild with Adrienne Rich and Susan Griffin, and co- founder of the California State University Sacramento Creative Writing Program, she is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and Professor Emeritus of English at CSUS. For over twenty-five years, she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband, Angus Wright, who writes about land reform and environmental issues. Her literary papers are archived in the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library, Northampton, MA. Her collection of rare editions of small press poetry books authored by Northern California poets is archived in the Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection.
Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA