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The Gone Thing
Monica McClure's second poetry collection excavates inheritances--historical, cultural, familial, and economic--as it alternates between magnified and microscopic views of American life. Born in rural Texas in 1986, the oldest of seven children, and once described by Craig Teicher of NPR as "the poster-girl for a new generation of poets," McClure revises the nuances of class, race, and clashing identities in a polyvocal style that flows out of her experience as an ambiguous academic turned ambivalent corporate creative; a firsthand witness to rural poverty and its colonial origins; a white Chicana with a vexed position in American society; an educated urbanite with a deep connection to the folklore and wisdom of her agricultural-worker ancestors. THE GONE THING upends traditions of pastoral poetry and bucolic subject matter, using the allegory of land stewardship to sketch a jagged narrative of personal and collective loss. Sometimes self-conscious, often unequivocally sincere, the lines that compose these poems lull and jolt their way across different barren political realms, the author's own fertile body, a suffering natural world, and an amnesiac society, in which the speaker works, shops, marvels, suffers, and doesn't die. "The border is the terrain of Monica McClure's poems, her world a flammable one made of money, work, worth. Her hypnotic stanzas burn with the kind of superheated attention that intensifies sight itself. With the prophetic intimacy and perfect aim of Alice Notley and Chelsey Minnis, McClure's hallucinatory poems press against reality not a mirror but a lit cigarette--as if to see what the real will reveal about itself, now that it's on fire. What can heat teach us. How much hotter can it get."--Joyelle McSweeney "Monica McClure's close-to-the-bone collection of remembrance and reverie takes you on a skin-scented slow dance through what Keats called the Mansion of Many Apartments, this time with Lana Del Rey's 'National Anthem' spinning softly in the background. So skillfully does McClure dissect the cruel poetics of beauty, loss, love, and the sharp inflection points of class, race, and gender that, to put it quite plainly, this book will slay you in your sleep."--Kim Rosenfield "Finely crafted but never overworked. This book is everything poetry should fresh, alive, surprising; explosive, daring, brutal; honest, searching, hungry."--Ethan Stebbins "In Monica McClure's extraordinary new book, transformations memories are disinterred into the present as dreamlike miniatures of variously-classed American life, at times mordant, at times severe. Any one thing seems always to be in the process of becoming another. The figures in McClure's poems are not just blurred, they're running. The poems narrate escape, tenuous and vibrating--escape from home, from acute desperation, from a bleak and threatening past that feels increasingly like a future. The 'gone thing' is what is missing and therefore ever-present, the hole burned into one's life by a torch of comprehensive predacity. That you have maybe crawled out of that hole does not delete it; it just leaves you staring back in fearful relief, waiting to slip."--Josef Kaplan Poetry. Family & Relationships. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published November 2, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 27, 2024
I remember a series of conversations I had about “pastoral poetry” in grad school. My professor was telling me that a pastoral poem doesn’t have to be in nature, because the form is more about “a poet” passing time with “people who recognize him as the poet.” Like the pastoral is more about a social arrangement, with the poet centered, and a bunch of otherwise idle people relying on him to keep them occupied. With poems! It took me a while to believe this professor, because I was a horrible student. David Mikics, if you’re out there, please know I have never quit thinking about a more contemporary definition of “pastoral poetry”
Since then, I’ve often thought about its malleability, or the poetic bending it can lead to. After all, my first exposure to the pastoral was Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar. But even last year, I read Ben Estes’s ABC Moonlight, which might be set in nature, but its play on what’s expected of the shepherd-poet (or just the shepherd independent of whether he might be a poet) is teasing at the boundaries of the form. For Monica McClure’s The Gone Thing, the poems concluding each of her sections being titled “Pastoral” establish at least an engagement with the form. That and references to shepherds. It shapes what I’m reading. Because my experience reading Tender Data was basically like being told a series of stories that were set in that one Beck song, “Get Real Paid.” Grimy and gritty and filthy and illicit.
And the difference between Tender Data and The Gone Thing is the not-in-the-middle-of-it-ness. Like the poet of The Gone Thing is past that life, but is still intimately aware of that lifestyle. In the poem “Rising Furies,” she’s even a lifestyle consultant further enhancing the experiences available to the outrageously wealthy. Which means if I’m going to read the book as a play on the pastoral, the poet of The Gone Thing is someone aware she’s the one who has been in the middle of things, among the garish desires of wealthy men, catering to that wealth. And laced through these lurid stories, she makes clear this is not where she came from. In her past, wealth has figuratively dressed her how it wanted her to appear, she knows the stories, but, as the pastoral tradition would make clear, that is not where she’s from, and that is not where she is now. She is a “shepherd” among other “shepherds” relating what that was like. Perhaps Tender Data is record of what had transpired, and it establish the authority she now holds to be the poet. The Gone Thing, then, is the class-conscious reckoning of what had come before.
This might be too restrictive a reading. Or it may signal an overly determined project operating in McClure’s book. That’s not how I read the book. If anything, what I’m trying to describe is the focus that I saw in Tender Data as a contrast to the poet’s complex position in The Gone Thing, where she is a mother, a worker, someone who has had to fashion a sustainable life via an inventive resourcefulness. For my reading, the pastoral frame helps negotiate the complexity of this book.
Since then, I’ve often thought about its malleability, or the poetic bending it can lead to. After all, my first exposure to the pastoral was Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar. But even last year, I read Ben Estes’s ABC Moonlight, which might be set in nature, but its play on what’s expected of the shepherd-poet (or just the shepherd independent of whether he might be a poet) is teasing at the boundaries of the form. For Monica McClure’s The Gone Thing, the poems concluding each of her sections being titled “Pastoral” establish at least an engagement with the form. That and references to shepherds. It shapes what I’m reading. Because my experience reading Tender Data was basically like being told a series of stories that were set in that one Beck song, “Get Real Paid.” Grimy and gritty and filthy and illicit.
And the difference between Tender Data and The Gone Thing is the not-in-the-middle-of-it-ness. Like the poet of The Gone Thing is past that life, but is still intimately aware of that lifestyle. In the poem “Rising Furies,” she’s even a lifestyle consultant further enhancing the experiences available to the outrageously wealthy. Which means if I’m going to read the book as a play on the pastoral, the poet of The Gone Thing is someone aware she’s the one who has been in the middle of things, among the garish desires of wealthy men, catering to that wealth. And laced through these lurid stories, she makes clear this is not where she came from. In her past, wealth has figuratively dressed her how it wanted her to appear, she knows the stories, but, as the pastoral tradition would make clear, that is not where she’s from, and that is not where she is now. She is a “shepherd” among other “shepherds” relating what that was like. Perhaps Tender Data is record of what had transpired, and it establish the authority she now holds to be the poet. The Gone Thing, then, is the class-conscious reckoning of what had come before.
This might be too restrictive a reading. Or it may signal an overly determined project operating in McClure’s book. That’s not how I read the book. If anything, what I’m trying to describe is the focus that I saw in Tender Data as a contrast to the poet’s complex position in The Gone Thing, where she is a mother, a worker, someone who has had to fashion a sustainable life via an inventive resourcefulness. For my reading, the pastoral frame helps negotiate the complexity of this book.
February 18, 2024
🤯🤯queen queen shit
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews