FORAGE
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. Available from Penguin September 3, 2019.
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“In Forage, Rose McLarney speaks to the interiority that hums inside us as we engage the natural world, which ‘speaks of us,’ as we ‘praise parks, what’s left of wilderness, and the literature of the diaspora.’ It’s all here, and it’s all alive with every line -- these poems stun me with their keen eye and their honest telling of what they view. It’s refreshing to find this much courage on the page, at a time when we need it the most.”
- Van Jordan “McLarney’s book is a call to prayer--or to arms--making itself a guardian of the diminishing natural world, in poems of fierce, edgy charm, of despair and forgetting. Beauty, that lives here too." - Marianne Boruch |
“Forage is indeed a book about gleaning nourishment from the bizarrely precarious world we have made. These poems in their gorgeous imagistic clarity deepen the story of life and ask of us, as the poet asks of herself, 'to whom/ have I made reverence truly known?' And what does the poet revere? The word, the wounded land, the wile of the wild, the shade of trees. An earthly constellation.” - Alison Hawthorne Deming “Reckoning with the most pressing questions regarding abundance and waste, the human capacity for love and corruption, and the raw possibilities of our future, McLarney asks, 'Must the answer be only the variety / of grief?' Given the lateness of things, perhaps so. On the other hand, the work in Forage is also the work of refusal, bringing fierce lament and complex song to the direness of our present.” -Rick Barot |