Travelers with No Ticket Home

by Mary Mackey

Overview

Poetry. In this stunning new collection, Mackey offers her readers fifty-eight intensely lyrical poems written with the same skill and passion that made her previous collection Sugar Zone winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Complex yet entirely accessible, the poems in TRAVELERS WITH NO TICKET HOME form a visionary meditation on nature, childhood, the destruction of the rainforest of the Amazon, and the real and psychological landscape of travel. Taking us from a small farm in Western Kentucky to the jungles of Brazil, Mackey touches on the broader human feelings of wonder, displacement, grief, love, and love's endless complications. Here too, for the first time, readers will find Mackey's complete "Kama Sutra of Kindness," a series of seven love poems written over the last thirty years.

"Mary Mackey joins other visionary poets of dépaysement... recovering a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forró, and death. The lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home."—Dennis Nurske

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780988235656
Publisher:	Marsh Hawk Press
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Pages:	82
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Mary Mackey received a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The University of Michigan. Her published works include six collections of poetry—three from Marsh Hawk Press, TRAVELERS WITH NO TICKET HOME (2014), SUGAR ZONE (2011), and BREAKING THE FEVER (2006)—and twelve novels, and she is the winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Her poems have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Dennis Nurkse, Ron Hansen, Dennis Schmitz, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Three times Garrison Keillor has featured her poetry on his program The Writer's Almanac. Mackey's work has been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. She is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Sacramento. For the last twenty years she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband, Angus Wright, who writes about land reform and environmental issues. At present she is working on a series of poems inspired by the works of Brazilian poets and novelists. Combining Portuguese and English, she creates poems that use Portuguese as incantation to evoke the lyrical space that lies at the conjunction between Portuguese and English.