“The book is a marvel—McLarney’s best, I think, and one of the finest, most mature, carefully constructed, and thoughtful collections I have encountered in some time… [Colorfast] is the first collection I have read from 2024, and it may very well prove the best.”
Shelf Awareness "McLarney collapses time, crafting something simultaneously region-specific and universal.”
Harvard Crimson "This collection is sure to intrigue and satisfy.”
The Millions "McLarney has been a gifted storyteller since her first book...but I dare say that she’s getting even better, more hypnotic. She’s one of our finest poets of the wild...A gorgeous book.
Publishers Weekly "Elegant...Readers will revel in the work’s undeniable beauty and smarts."
Blue Stem “I think, for now anyway, the momentum of southern poetry is with female poets: Ellen Bryant Voigt, Natasha Trethewey, the late Claudia Emerson, and now, perhaps, Rose McLarney.”
The Rumpus "The stern, stoic persona and voice she crafts is so tragically appealing, we want to keep getting stomach-punched…In these moments, McLarney’s grim lyricism keeps us rapt, agog, and sometimes frightened. She writes uncompromising, honest poems that sound like no one else…"
Glint Journal "Ultimately, what is foraged is faith in words, in their capacity for serving as glimmers amid existential darkness, as charms against loss, disappointment, annihilation."
Kenyon Review "...to observe the world before you so as to discover a sweetness and a necessity you might otherwise overlook—is at the core of McLarney’s ecopoetic project in Forage...To read through Forage is to experience an interconnected poetry collection about interconnectivity."
The Millions "One of the finest mythmakers in contemporary Appalachian letters is Rose McLarney."
The Iowa Review "Solemnity in poetry requires caution: nothing is worse than verse dripping with self-significance. McLarney, thankfully, is exactly the poet to handle such material… McLarney’s poems are such gifts."
RHINO "...the poet finds ways to sing of what’s left or broken or only in parts."
The Los Angeles Review "McLarney’s eye and ear are dead-on. The result is a stubbornly-rooted first collection of impressive insight and craft."
The Los Angeles Review: "An Aesthetics of Earliness" "The Always Broken Plates of Mountains is a book where time is slow, and this slow time is also a deeply social as well as a psychic time…McLarney plumbs the depths."
Blackbird "Skillfully embedded with figurative language, McLarney’s work rewards close reading…Intense and unsentimental, these carefully wrought poems show both sophistication and economy."
Publisher's Weekly "Her lines are steeped in memory, loss, love, and the immediate textures of her natural environment."
Orion "The poems in Its Day Being Gone are devoted to emotional, physical, and historical connection with the land and with others, past and present. In these links, this rootedness, is where we find our hope."
Hayden’s Ferry Review "These poems seem to have emerged almost organically from the land from which they’ve been wrought…the poet speaks with a voice as urgent and clear as a mountain spring."
The Smoky Mountain News "Her work poems have the pith, the profundity, the probing of Berry’s, and yet she is very much her own muse, making a new poetry..."
“It’s refreshing to find this much courage on the page, at a time when we need it the most.” -Van Jordan
“…poems of fierce, edgy charm, of despair and forgetting. Beauty, that lives here too." -Marianne Boruch
Playlist
Listen to a selection of music to accompany Colorfast at Largehearted Boy: Books and Music.