Local Extinctions

by Mary Quade

Mary Quade, our lady of broken birds with still beating hearts, of the haunts within a covered bridge, is in love with things (empty dresses, sticks and branches, county fair food), with animals (a sick raccoon, moles, the last passenger pigeon), and because she is in love, she is both fiercely curious and deeply wary. These poems of great, imaginative empathy are sharpened with the understanding that, really, we are so greedy, "all unclean, all appetite." -- Katie Northrop

One of Mary Quade's poems, making an analogy with photographic depth of field, begins by observing that "The smaller the window / the more you will see / clearly." The whole of Local Extinctions, from the birthday party magician in the first poem to the American Legion pancakes at the county fair in the last, embraces that principle as an ideal. The infinite care Mary Quade takes in framing and focus results every time in perfect clarity, each poem revealing something that only Quade could show us, as only she could show it. -- H. L. Hix

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2016

Reviews

[Linds · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ~ what a beautiful collection of poetry. i love the imagery so so much and i love the focus on the environment! these poems are just so important and i felt so many of them in my bones

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Quade's "Local Extinctions" melds the ecological awareness of our destruction of nature through the example of the passenger pigeon with subtle social commentary and personal biography. She has the careful eye of a naturalist with a whimsical sense of comarision as she describes the mole:

Its tined fin-like forelegs
for diving, surfacing--land's
inconsiderable whale

And she looks at her own childhood without maudlin nostalgia but a gratitude for its "Small Hurts" as she gives homage to the rough playground of her youth in comparison with the too-safe plastic and rubber mulched present:

You allowed us all
to break our bones, to see beneath our blank
skin--
persecuted knees, ephemeral teeth, the sanguine world
of gravity..."

There is something of Maxine Kumin in Quade's work and something all her own."Local Extinctions" is a joy to read even as it squarely faces the mortality of the individual and the species.

[Aer · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 - ugh i loooved the first half, but it started to lose me a bit after that