The acclaimed poet, memoirist, and essayist Maureen N. McLane here charts a new path into vital genre-bending territories. Not a verse novel, not a verse memoir,
Mz N: the serial:
A Poem-in-Episodes
offers something else—"life . . . a continual allegory" (to invoke Keats): a life intense, episodic, female, sexual, philosophical, romantic, analytic. Tracking the growth of one poet's mind, switchbacking its way through American English,
Mz N
toggles between story and song. This is a poetry both "furious / & alive."
Alive to the lash of love, the longueurs of adolescence, the limits of identity,
Mz N:
the serial:
is a bravura experiment in life-writing—an assaying, a testing, a transforming, an honoring of the tentative and the torqued. What is it to be contemporary, to be "one / among other ones" in a "cracking world"? How does a body vibrate into being? How is a mind made out of other minds? Seizing the queer realities of any life,
explores how one is surprised, seduced, and struck into speech, thought, song, silence. "Then, what is life?" cried Shelley. So too
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