Here All Night

by Jill McDonough

McDonough’s latest collection is fiercely unapologetic, transforming mundane moments into witty and provocative insights that closely examine the flaws in our quick-moving society. Using dark humor, the poems address the impermanence of life and how we should always find reasons to re-evaluate ourselves as empathetic beings over our selfish tendencies.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Jill McDonough has lived in North Carolina, Maine, and Japan, as well as San Francisco, Boston, and New York. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before graduating from Stanford University with a bachelor of arts in English. She received a master’s degree in Creative Writing, Poetry, from Boston University.

A long-time teacher with Boston University’s Prison Education Program, she teaches college-level courses in prisons around Boston.

Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, Slate and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center, she was also recently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this a lot: the extraversion, gregariousness, adventurous-spiritedness. The fun the poems have with form (sonnets, villanelles, ghazals), with slant rhyme and meter. Immediacy, earthiness, humor, sass. Warmth and an endearing readiness to take delight in people and in things. A rather lovably Frank-O'Hara-esque tendency to namedrop the six or seven friends with whom she spent the evening being recounted (and then Michael said this, and then Susan said that...), and oh what a lovely time they had! Tender love poems about her partner Josey and their daily life together. Sometimes she reminded me of Ellen Bass; other times, of Matthew Olzmann.

There's a fair number of recognizable local references to Massachusetts life, and I almost squealed when I stumbled on a poem about my favorite dim sum place: "The dim sum place by Dumpling Cafe has it / both ways. Empire Garden says one side of its marquee; / Emperor Garden the other. So it hides, even though / it's enormous: an old vaudeville theatre, complete / with proscenium, murals, gold everywhere, gold / dragon and crane with red lights for eyes...."

One of my favorite poems was "Emily Dickinson, Amazonian Canoes," which balances a heartbreaking vulnerability ("Laughing like this / at a table like this -- dappled summer shade, tall / cherry trees -- is all I ever wanted when I didn't know / what one could want. As a child I wanted to be / a prostitute or a lounge singer") and piquantly detailed humor ("Maggie asked / her prof what Robert Frost meant by belly-laced. / Belilaced, Ann Winters sighed"). Another great one is the prose poem "Woman Comes Into a Bar," which similarly balances empathy for a down-on-her-luck customer with realism and humor ("A woman comes into the bar where I work, asks me how her hair looks.... Her bangs don't match her extensions, and I agree with my father: only floozies dye their hair. But I lie. She's on something, says there's two warrants out for her arrest, and some asshole just stole her stuff. My woman stuff, you know what I mean? I don't know what she means"). The poem ends with the speaker making the dyed-hair woman feel better by telling her the inside scoop about the jail in Framingham ("lots of great girls, and cosmetology classes") and making her laugh. (McDonough has done substantial teaching inside prisons.)

The most moving poem was "Sealing Woodrow," in which the speaker jokingly asks some Mormon missionaries to evangelize to the ghost of her dead grandfather Woodrow, whom she remembers for his crustiness: "him / saying pipe down.... he could barely stand me during half time." But despite this and despite her religious skepticism, she takes pleasure from imagining how the missionaries will "preach / till he gets the picture, knows the truth: I became / the pain in the ass he always knew I'd be, there's / an afterlife, he's in it, and I'm thinking of him."

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read immediately even if you think poetry is not for you. You won’t regret it.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious and deep - perfect.

[Josette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always end up with a not-unpleasant ache when I read Jill McDonough’s poems. The titles are ALL amazing, irreverent and pithy, sharp and colloquial. My favorites surprised me and made me laugh out loud, and some of the poems felt so real, the lines and language so spot on, I had to close the book for a day to get my head to stop spinning. “In which I am accused of sleeping my way to the top” — nails the hilarity and ridiculousness with a perfect ending! “Ming” totally deserves the Pushcart prize, but I have to admit I didn’t realize how good it was until the second or third read — something about how it circles around (“this endless loop”) and how it creates a lesson for us all out of a particular event and a particular person’s life (“the instant the Ming first leans...you gain a week”). Selfishly, I’d love to place my poem “My Utopia” on a page opposite Jill’s “Also, homemade flamethrowers,” which both imagine a perfect world where people read a lot of books and are thus whole and happy. But hers involves zombies, so it’s much better. :)

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this to someone who disdained poetry and she was like Oh, hey, that's not so bad...