new poetry from Penguin Poets
Rose McLarney’s fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated. McLarney reconsiders girlhood stories, acknowledges omissions from Southern history, and studies the silences of women’s and other voices left out of accounts of the past. Yet she does not write of only what has been lost, defying elegy with tributes to her mother while she is alive to read them, and finding vibrancy that remains in sources such as weeds, gravel, insect shells, and the flawed human body. Colorfast weaves its threads into poems that, like the women who dwell in them, are subtly strong enough to stand alone, while they also connect into a provocative conversation about heritage and the holds we can keep.
From reviews:
“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…
McLarney’s thinking evolves in finely tinted color-like gradations, with poems on the tending of plants, for instance, preparing for subsequent poems on the raising of children and the commodification of flowers in perfumes…. Colorfast, as its title suggests, is a holding-fast streaked through with loss, a leave-taking that is always a return.
It is the first collection I have read from 2024, and it may very well prove the best.”
—Christopher Kempf, Preposition
“In this life-affirming and refreshing fourth collection, McLarney (Forage) finds beauty in simplicity and experience…These excellent poems are a testament to finding wonder in the world’s simple truths.”
—Starred Review, Publisher’s Weekly
Colorfast
From the cover:
“Colorfast is magnificent…this book is for us all.”
“Exquisite . . . McLarney is rare, her vision rare…”
“Colorfast is an immersive life in verse. Splendid."
On Forage, Penguin, 2019:
Rose McLarney has won attention as a poet of impressive insight and craft; her third collection, Forage, offers considerations of the natural world and humans' place within it in ecopoetry of both ambitious reach and elegant refinement. At the confluence of these intricately sequenced poems is a social commentary that goes beyond lamenting environmental degradation and disaster to record--and augment--the beauty of the world in which we live.
Download a reader's companion and teaching guide to Forage, including discussion questions and writing prompts.