Crash Centre

by David McLoghlin

With unusual, memoir-like power, Crash Centre explores what happens when grooming, gaslighting and abuse masquerade as trust in the relationship between the author and a charismatic literary monk—an antagonist who unites the more toxic legacies of the Catholic Church and Northern-Irish Republicanism. Set at an elite boarding school in the early 1990s, this powerful, affecting work addresses questions of mentorship and betrayal, trauma, memory and erasure, as well as pathways to recovery. Employing impactful, direct address at key moments, the poems also use fairytale imagery and resonant poetic closure. Where Crash Centre begins as self-witness, to reclaim a younger self from silence, by the end it breaks through to a lost community, speaking to, and for, others.



In David McLoghlin’s work, Ireland encounters a new poetry: a male poet willing to write his body, willing to record what has been done to it. In Crash Centre, McLoghlin has braced himself for impact, for a deep dive into the very site of his abuse. The safety of metaphor is gone, replaced by the closeness of simile; there is no distance now—the reality of his bodily experience absolutely, microscopically captured. We feel a moral duty to re-trace this journey downwards alongside the poet, to see what he sees, has seen, can barely bring himself to see again. These are parts and places previously untravelled—terrain few male poets have dared to map. Hinted at in the work of some, perhaps, in John Montague’s “warm tracks” radiating across that “white expanse” of his lover’s body. But here is work that goes deeper, layers deep… shifting the power dynamics of sex in brave, compassionate and unflinching ways. David McLoghlin is a male poet brave enough to write the truth of his body and what has been done to it. He is aware of what this signifies—the dawn of a new tradition for male poets, a determined blooming out from what has come before, an expansion across new ground.

Jennifer Horgan
Author and Journalist

84 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2024

About the author

David McLoghlin is an Irish poet and literary translator, and the author of Waiting for Saint Brendan and Other Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2012), part of which was awarded second prize in The Patrick Kavanagh Awards, and Sign Tongue, winner of the 2014 Goodmorning Menagerie Chapbook-in-Translation prize. David’s second collection, Santiago Sketches, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. David received first-class honours from University College, Dublin for his research MA in modern Spanish literature, and holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he was a Teaching Fellow. He received a major Literature Bursary from The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon in 2006, and was the Howard Nemerov Scholar at the 2011 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Most recently, he was a prize-winning finalist for the 2015 Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, judged by Billy Collins. His writing has been broadcast on WNYC’s Radiolab, and published in journals like Poetry Ireland Review, Barrow Street, The Stinging Fly, Cimarron Review, The Moth magazine, Hayden's Ferry Review and The Shop. He has taught at University College, Dublin, NYU and Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital. and served as Resident Writer at Hunts Point Alliance for Children in the South Bronx. He was an International Editor of Washington Square review and a Co-Editor of (e)L Paper magazine, a bilingual journal of the arts based in Santiago de Chile and Queens, NY. David lives with his wife in Brooklyn, NY, where in June 2016 they ended a three-year run as the founders and hosts of The Eagle and the Wren reading series, where they hosted almost 150 writers, pairing Pulitzer-Prize winners and Guggenheim Fellows with exciting emerging writers and poets.

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of painful recollections reaches back to ‘Beginning to Trust’ published in “Waiting for Saint Brendan,” years earlier. ‘Trust’ ends with the line, “l want to wake you and tell you what happened.” Oh my, did he ever tell the readers what happened. So much complicity….