Sugar Zone

by Mary Mackey

Fierce, surreal, ecstatic, and passionately transcendent, the sixty-two beautifully crafted poems in Mary Mackey's Sugar Zone offer depth and complexity while at the same time remaining entirely accessible. Mackey's range is extraordinary. Although over half the poems take as their subject the great cities and tropical rainforest of Brazil, which Mackey knows intimately, her real subject is a journey through a visionary landscape of the human heart which lies somewhere between Saint Theresa's Inner Castle and the thicket of Eros.“In Sugar Zone, Mary Mackey takes you on a fascinating journey to the interior, somewhere between Saint Theresa’s Inner Castle and the thicket of Eros—but also a place of desperate actuality, even if it is on the other side of the world. Mackey joins other visionary poets of dépaysement—Henri Michaux in Asia, John Ash in Anatolia, Sharon Doubiago in Peru, Lorca in Manhattan. But Mackey really seems to recover a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forró, and death. Please read ‘Cold Snap’’ who but Mackey could have written it? Sugar Zone authoritatively creates a language and a culture; but the lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home.” --Dennis Nurkse“Mary Mackey’s new collection Sugar Zone is the culmination of many trips to Brazil. Most poems crackle with lush imagery; others are stark and draw their strength from the wisdom of the saying. These are death haunted poems but full of the vitality of the jungle, the favelas of Rio, the Amazon itself.” --Marge Piercy “Mackey’s crisp-edged perceptions are set down in these poems with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly unflinching eye.” --Jane Hirshfield

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

"New York Times" bestselling author Mary Mackey's published works include 13 novels, and 7 books of poetry including "Sugar Zone" which won the 2012 PEN Oakland Award for Literary Excellence. They have sold over a million and a half copies and been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, and Finnish.

Mary is related through her father's family to Mark Twain. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. During the early 1970s she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. For the last twenty-five years, she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband Angus Wright. The rainforests of the Amazon and the people of Brazil have been a major influence on two of her collections of poetry, "Sugar Zone" and "Travelers With No Ticket Home", and on two of her novels: "The Widow's War," and "The Village of Bones," which is a prequel to her bestselling Earthsong Serious about Prehistoric Europe.

From 1989 to 1992 she served as Chair of PEN American Center, West. Currently, she is Emeritus Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.

While her poetry has mainly centered around the traditional lyric themes of love, death, and nature, her novels have ranged from the Midwestern United States to the Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. A screenwriter as well as a novelist, she has sold feature scripts to Warner Brothers as well as to various independent film companies.

Mary has lectured at many places including Harvard and the Smithsonian. Additionally, she has contributed to such diverse print and on-line publications as The Chiron Review, Redbook, and Salon. She occasionally writes comedy under the pen name "Kate Clemens".

Her popular "People Who Make Books Happen" interview series can be found on her Blog http://marymackey.com/the-writers-jou.... A free resource for writers and readers, it contains interviews with experts on various topics including "How To Get An Agent," and "Helping Independent Bookstores Survive and Thrive." You are invited to ask Mary questions about these interviews and other topics by going to the Goodreads "Ask The Author" section of this profile page or by visiting her website at http://marymackey.com/.

The photograph of Mary Mackey was taken by Irene Young.

Reviews

[Charles Ayres · Rating 5 out of 5]

Presently Brazil is a country of great contrast. You have the excitement of a developing nation coming into its own and a bright and sunny culture of samba and carnival. Then you have the dark side: the narcotics trade, the recent military dictatorship, the lingering shadow of slavery. I feel Mary Mackey's SUGAR ZONE encapsulates these contrasting aspects of the fascinating country of BRAZIL in her poetry.

If you like poetry and a little Brazilian-Portuguese flair, then check out this collection of evocative and sensual poemas. Eu gostava de ler isso.