American Wake

McCadden's sparse yet vibrant poetry spans those two geographies she finds home in, New England and Ireland. The vastness of loss, grief and family parallel only mountainous terrains and the waving sea. -NPR American Wake slows things down that are speeding past and wakes us up to the past and present tense. I love its worried wakefulness. -Edward Hirsch Navigates loss with such unparalleled sensitivity and inventiveness that language becomes its own jubilant force of survival. -Major Jackson The poems, plainspoken distillations of origins and loss, explore histories, teasing at what we know without knowing, and know without remembering we know. A book of quiet, watchful radiance. -The Boston Globe Must-Read Poetry -The Millions The book's stylistic variety is striking . . . McCadden loves fables and etymologies, genre jumping and digital imaging, and we can hear her at play in long lines, searching for a hue, texture or rhythm. -Seven Days The poems in this powerful, haunted book won't let go of the grief they carry. American Wake passes through the valley of the shadow of death to arrive at wisdom and love, and implies there is no other way to go. -Maurice Manning American Wake doesn't warn as much as warm-it keeps company and shares the complexity of loving one another. There's a paper-thin ridge between the sea-land of the dead and the land-sea of the living, and it's on that ridge that Kerrin McCadden rides, writes, shouts into the wind. -Brenda Shaughnessy Contrasting the luscious femininities of a Tess Gallagher in her peregrinations from Washington to Sligo, with the stern abrasions of a Seamus Heaney translating himself from Station Island to Harvard, Kerrin McCadden's American Wake explores in depth the repercussions of emigration from generation to tragic generation, at one point receding as far back as Cuchulain. -Medbh McGuckian In American Wake, a husband is given an aubade featuring a paving company; a brother dies again and again; and the rivers, lakes and seas seamlessly connect us to other worlds: rural life, Ireland, our younger selves, the underworld. These are sustaining poems, a gift in our times. -Connie Voisine Kerrin McCadden is a poet who knows things, and American Wake is her American sublime: poems for our elegiac now, built for all time. This is a stunning work. -Joshua Jelly-Schapiro