Life List
New and Selected Poems
Imprint: Resource Publications
214 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 x 0.43 in
- Paperback
- 9781666704846
- Published: August 2021
$24.00 / £19.00 / AU$37.00
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Journals publishing Janet McCann’s work include Kansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou'wester, America, Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, New York Quarterly, Tendril, and others. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she taught at Texas A&M University from 1969 until 2015 and is now a professor emerita. She has coedited anthologies with David Craig, Odd Angles of Heaven (1994), Place of Passage (2000), and Poems of Francis and Clare (2004). She has written three poetry books and six chapbooks. Her most recent poetry book is The Crone at the Casino (2014). She also has coauthored two textbooks and written a book on Wallace Stevens (Wallace Stevens: The Celestial Possible, 1996). She is a Catholic and lives in College Station, Texas, with her dog.
“The poems in Life List offer an extraordinary depiction of life from childhood through old age, moving us to tears and laughter through reminiscence, dreams, and evocations of classical and contemporary art and letters.”
—Bonnie Braendlin, author of the Caulfield, Sheridan Mystery Series
“McCann is a religious poet, but not in a pedestrian or fundamentalist sense. From Italy to Texas, these poems deal with nostalgia. How to retrieve ‘it’—if not now, then at some future point. How to please get it back. From a deceased husband’s memory to fleeing from the pandemic. From a crummy bar in Florence or a lost painting, we must go on, and we do.”
—Sybil Estess, author of Mississippi Milkwater
“How do I love the poetry of Janet McCann? Let me count the ways: her wicked sense of humor, her clear eye, her choice of organizing this book around growing up and growing old in mid-century America, and her refusal to give in to despair, though loss is all around. I loved every single poem in this collection, and you, dear reader, will too.”
—Barbara Crooker, author of The Book of Kells
“McCann’s volume of new and selected poems, Life List, begins by taking readers on a trip to an almost-forgotten world of a childhood seventy years ago. The first poems reference such memory ticklers as bathing caps, jelly glasses, a child slung over a parent’s shoulder being called ‘a sack of potatoes,’ and the bright wax lips that were sold in candy stores as a Halloween disguise. We watch as the child of the early poems matures and steps out into the world with ever an eye toward the tactile, the contradictory, the urgent, and the ordinary, all of which she has recorded and generously shares with her readers. Later poems look back with new insight and appreciation for the life she has lived. The book is an invitation to each reader to give thought to his or her life through the prism of the author’s reflections on her own.”
—Christine H. Boldt, author of For Every Tatter