Like moonlight, McCann's attention gives weird clarity and an alien glow to post-industrial landscapes and human interiors. These poems are startling and irreverent, but also emotional and approachable. They uncivilize us into seeing the world as both ruin and possibility: "It was danger/ gave them life/ but damage/ makes us shine." Anthony McCann is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first book, "Father of Noise," was published by Fence Books in 2003. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he teaches English as a Second Language.
Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of four collections of poetry including Thing Music (Wave Books, 2014). His book Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a nonfiction prose work investigating the 2016 armed right-wing occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Anthony’s teaching, writing and research interests include 19th, 20th and 21st century North American Poetry; Political Theology; Political Ecology; Native American History; History of the Revolutionary, Constitutional and Reconstruction eras; Ecological History of the American West; Cultural Anthropology; Modern Latin American Poetry; and Anarchist thought and practice as it pertains to art-making, politics and other spheres of human endeavor. He lives in the Mojave Desert.
Moongarden was fantastic. I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in current poetry. His patterns of cause and effect never quite align which really drams the read in. McCann destabilizes the reader's world as he is simultaneously creating the world of the poem
i read this book last semester and i am now fortunate enough to be TAing for Anthony. He is a wonderful poet/teacher and anyone interested in poetry should really read this.