Python with a Dog Inside It

Set on the marshlands of working-class southern New Jersey, Python with a Dog Inside It, the debut collection by poet Max McDonough, traces the tangled story of two gay brothers as they endeavor to survive their mother's erratic and escalating violence. They retreat to the privacy of suburban woods and swamps, a world of their own glimmering with ruin and possibility: abandoned furniture, mud-caked jewelry, a time machine. The poems in this collection occupy, as Judith Herman describes it, ...