Name: The Gone Thing
SKU: WE007
Price: 20.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Monica McClure

The Gone Thing

$20.00 | November 2023 | ISBN 978-1-959708-05-6

In stock

Monica McClure’s second poetry collection excavates inheritances—historical, cultural, familial, and economic—as it alternates between magnified and microscopic views of American life.

Born in rural Texas in 1986, the oldest of seven children, and once described by Craig Teicher of NPR as “the poster-girl for a new generation of poets,” McClure revises the nuances of class, race, and clashing identities in a polyvocal style that flows out of her experience as an ambiguous academic turned ambivalent corporate creative; a firsthand witness to rural poverty and its colonial origins; a white Chicana with a vexed position in American society; an educated urbanite with a deep connection to the folklore and wisdom of her agricultural-worker ancestors. The Gone Thing upends traditions of pastoral poetry and bucolic subject matter, using the allegory of land stewardship to sketch a jagged narrative of personal and collective loss. Sometimes self-conscious, often unequivocally sincere, the lines that compose these poems lull and jolt their way across different landscapes: barren political realms, the author’s own fertile body, a suffering natural world, and an amnesiac society, in which the speaker works, shops, marvels, suffers, and doesn’t die.

Finely crafted but never overworked. This book is everything poetry should be: fresh, alive, surprising; explosive, daring, brutal; honest, searching, hungry.
—Ethan Stebbins

SKU: WE007 Genre: Poetry Tag: poetry

The border is the terrain of Monica McClure’s poems, her world a flammable one made of money, work, worth. Her hypnotic stanzas burn with the kind of superheated attention that intensifies sight itself. With the prophetic intimacy and perfect aim of Alice Notley and Chelsey Minnis, McClure’s hallucinatory poems press against reality not a mirror but a lit cigarette—as if to see what the real will reveal about itself, now that it’s on fire. What can heat teach us. How much hotter can it get.
—Joyelle McSweeney

Monica McClure’s close-to-the-bone collection of remembrance and reverie takes you on a skin-scented slow dance through what Keats called the Mansion of Many Apartments, this time with Lana Del Rey’s “National Anthem” spinning softly in the background. So skillfully does McClure dissect the cruel poetics of beauty, loss, love, and the sharp inflection points of class, race, and gender that, to put it quite plainly, this book will slay you in your sleep.
—Kim Rosenfield

In Monica McClure’s extraordinary new book, transformations abound: memories are disinterred into the present as dreamlike miniatures of variously-classed American life, at times mordant, at times severe. Any one thing seems always to be in the process of becoming another: “It is a kind of leisure to watch the figures you once knew / Become hallucinations in the long waves of a spent day.” But the restless tone of the book betrays the recurrent violence at its core. The figures in McClure’s poems are not just blurred, they’re running. The poems narrate escape, tenuous and vibrating—escape from home, from acute desperation, from a bleak and threatening past that feels increasingly like a future. The “gone thing” is what is missing and therefore ever-present, the hole burned into one’s life by a torch of comprehensive predacity. That you have maybe crawled out of that hole does not delete it; it just leaves you staring back in fearful relief, waiting to slip.
—Josef Kaplan

McClure guides readers through a jarring and poignant critique of cultural and societal norms in her unrestrained second collection. … This volume intimately and expansively weaves personal anecdotes with broader societal observations.
—Publishers Weekly

Monica McClure is one of my favorite contemporary poets. The Gone Thing, her follow-up to Tender Data, her mind-bending 2015 debut, is powered by the tension between seemingly contrary forces: money and poverty; the too-cool-for-you world of couture fashion and utter vulnerability; art and office life; motherhood and daughterhood. It’s a book about borders — the U.S. southern border, the borders between high and low culture, between McClure’s Mexican heritage and her cosmopolitan New York life, and between humor and dire seriousness. It’s all rolled into one slippery sensibility, equal parts social critique and personal excavation.
—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR/WNYC

The Gone Thing follows the contrapuntal lines that divide our personal and economic realities: labor vs. leisure, production vs. consumption, home and family vs. alienation. Rage, finely processed, mounts against a shallow, pill-induced tranquility. … [T]his collection of poems rises like a metallic yet living thing welded of the corporate and the pastoral, braced against uncertainty and instability.
—Sylvia Dziewałtowska, Harp & Altar

Monica McClure is a Brooklyn-based writer and author of the poetry collection, Tender Data (Birds, LLC) and the chapbooks, Concomitance (Counterpath Press), Boss Parts 1& 2 (If A Leaf Falls Press), Mala (Poor Claudia), and Mood Swing (Snacks Press). With Madeleine Maillet and Emily Brandt, she runs Yellow Wallpaper, an organization that promotes radically and rigorously curated books and book culture for readers outside major metropolitan areas. She works as a copywriter for e-commerce and tech.