Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes

by Kerrin McCadden

Overview

This collection is about living in the rural North. Inside that, it is about isolation and love and loneliness. Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes is preoccupied with reckoning, with grief and happiness, with divorce and what constitutes family. At its core are people trying to cross the lines between them—emotional, physical, intellectual. It is not, however, a book that embraces sadness, making, instead, at every turn it can, a way to lean toward joy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936970261
Publisher:	New Issues Poetry and Prose
Publication date:	03/01/2014
Series:	First Book
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

KERRIN MCCADDEN'S poems have appeared recently in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Green Mountains Review, Failbetter, Rattle and elsewhere. She is the recent recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, as well as support from The Vermont Arts Endowment Fund and The Vermont Studio Center. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Montpelier High School in Montpelier, Vermont and is an MFA degree candidate at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Plainfield, Vermont with her two children.

Table of Contents

I

Becca 9

Elegy for Some Beach Houses 10

Mostly, She Practices Falling 11

Safety Instructions 13

The Death of the Reader 15

How To Miss a Man 17

Ways To Say Goodbye 18

Definition 20

Love Poem Not for a Husband 22

II.

Saint Athanasios at Meteora 27

Intersection 29

Insomnia 30

What I Said to the Night 31

Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes 34

Skeletons 36

My Brother Sits for a Life Drawing Class 37

Fable 39

Ballooning 40

Elegy for the Woman Who Became a Chair 41

III

Winter 47

Jake 48

Bedtime 50

Little Ghost Girl 51

Once, I Was Not Lonely 52

Tom and Jerry 53

Laika 55

Ante Up 56

Saint Albans 57

The Domino's Pizza Gorilla 59

At the Wellsboro/Johnston Airport 61

At the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon 62

IV

Nostalgia 67

Bone China 69

Commute 71

Dear Day in Late September 72

UVB-76 74

Apology, Its Absence 77

The Southern Tablelands 79

Second Cut 81

Say Sing 82

What People are Saying About This

David St. John

“Kerrin McCadden’s Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes is one of the most compelling and powerful debut collections in recent American poetry. These exquisite meditations on the lived life are often nothing less than stunning, and are at times truly devastating. This gorgeous collection is both mature and tender in its reckonings of our shifting relationships with family and loved ones. Kerrin McCadden is especially accomplished in considering those who’ve engaged in constructions of daily happiness only to discover that what they’d begun in dream has ended in quiet wreckage. Poem by poem, we are consoled by the poet’s remarkable reflective ease and her profound intimacy. The beauty of these poems is matched only by their sense of triumph in resilience, and its resulting peace.”

Editorial Reviews

In her poem 'Burial,' published in this isue, Kerrin McCadden juxtaposes an indoor scene of mourning with an outdoor scene of work that must be done despite, and to move through, that mourning. The poem enacts a mash-up of song where human, machine, and bird voices combine, and these sorts of intersections of scenes and music are emblematic of McCaddens work. The poems in her first book, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, are wide and wise enough to encompass that which is brusque and well as gentle, the methodical and the ambiguous. McCadden's work seeks, delicately yet steadfastly, to illuminate complex mysteries that nevertheless remain partly in shadow. Through her poems we learn truths about our shadowy, mashed-up world; in 'Burial,' not only do we come to understand something of the way a woodcock makes its song, but about how to grieve in a worl that moves on, keeps digging.”—Rachel Contrenl Flynn, Beloit Poetry Journal

From the Publisher