In just five lines, Jo McDougall can make you shudder. Her poems are often as stark and open as their settings - the Kansas plains and Southern bottomlands. But in these wide fields and hot kitchens, on these front porches where ordinary people tell their stories, the everyday becomes fabled, truth becomes hallowed. To C. D. Wright, McDougall writes "a lean, stoic line; each poem makes its mark, like spit". In those lines, McDougall brings to life farmers, dressmakers, widows, and waitresses with such precise clarity that we take part in the strange delights, the struggles, the tangled...
In just five lines, Jo McDougall can make you shudder. Her poems are often as stark and open as their settings - the Kansas plains and Southern bottom...
C.D. Wright has said that Jo McDougall writes a lean stoic line; each poem makes its mark, like spit. With precise clarity McDougall brings to life farmers, dressmakers, widows, and waitresses so that we take part in the strange delights and tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.
C.D. Wright has said that Jo McDougall writes a lean stoic line; each poem makes its mark, like spit. With precise clarity McDougall brings to life fa...
Jo McDougall brings a poet's sensibility to memoir, recounting five generations of Delta rice farmers. Through family archives and oral histories, she traces how the clan made their way into the fabric of America, beginning with her Belgian-immigrant grandfather, a pioneer rice farmer on the Arkansas Delta at the turn of the twentieth century.
As John Grisham has for a 1950s Arkansas cotton farm, McDougall illuminates an Arkansas rice farm in the 1930s and 1940s. The Garot family's acreage near DeWitt and the town itself provide the stage for McDougall's wry, compelling, and layered...
Jo McDougall brings a poet's sensibility to memoir, recounting five generations of Delta rice farmers. Through family archives and oral histories, she...
"In the Home of the Famous Dead" will appeal to newcomers as well as to avid followers of Jo McDougall s long career and complex work, providing valuable insights to the development of a poet s signature, inimitable style. This collection presents work known for its sparse, compact language; surprising metaphor; humor; irony; idiomatic speech; and a stoic, sadly earned wisdom concerning death and loss. In McDougall s world, folks making do with what they have take the stage to speak of, in the words of one critic, the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives. Her work has been described as...
"In the Home of the Famous Dead" will appeal to newcomers as well as to avid followers of Jo McDougall s long career and complex work, providing valua...
