“All of her lines are demanding, especially her last lines—puzzling yet provocative, they’re like little switches that flip at the end, sending the reader back into the poet’s maze of words.” —The New York Times Book Review “In poems that are rich with wordplay—puns, rhymes, syntactical twists—Heather McHugh reveals the complex layers of meaning that individual words or phrases contain. The result is intellectually challenging, yet emotionally engaging verse that balances gravity with humor.” —The MacArthur Foundation

Co-op available; Advance reader copies available for national mailing; National advertising planned for PW, Poets & Writers, etc.; National print campaign targeting major outlets like PW, Booklist, Library Journal, The New York Times, New Yorker, etc., and the many outlets in which McHugh has already been reviewed, like The New Yorker, PBS, etc.; Online/social media campaign; eBook available; Giveaway planned; Regional Pacific Northwest Tour and Canadian tour

Shots in the ICU The unwritten CDs have stripes of spectrum down their faces, there in their transparent cases—perfect traces of what otherwise were mere idea or metaphor . . . some gist or twist or history of light. The pure appearance of refraction in these lines can shift into the vertical; it’s utterly resistant to the daily laterals and dull collaterals; its otherworldliness is wildest for precision: close-up rainbow several millimeters wide, a dwelling place for uncontainables—in analytic radiance to run from the outer edge of a disc straight toward its center, not in coils, concentric (as upon his old LPs), but deepening in radii from two to three towards four dimensions. His bifocals now removed, his hopes extinguished, Dad keeps hissing life’s a swindle. Birthing room to deathbed, that’s the line—a legacy from sunlight, long profession now inclined to sharpness, as the read-outs turn to shout-outs, shivers to Intensive Care’s own nursing station. ere’s the backed-up window-ledge I rest my sights upon— the plumb-line down the centers of the stacked CDs, unreadable until a setting star brings out a better sense for it in me. The rods and cones inform a living hole with spiked or spindly evidence. O pupil! Crazy cornucopia! For I was blind, and you were blind, but now we have myopia. One Big Being Despite our greeds and all Our cultural tenacities, which pull us Back like suckers on a Phototrope The destiny of our Increasing numbers on Diminishment of ground Is towards convergence, and The averaging away of the extremes. Sometimes it’s hard to read or feel it, but In time it has to happen. Solid waters melt To one dynamic sea, and earth flows Up from pressure, widening to air; we cannot help Resembling one another more and more: the races, parties, Genders, even ages tend to lose their hallowed individualities. A matter of techology, as well: the mind is seeded, seeding other minds (we call this fashion, when we name the memes). So then the lines and boundaries relent (whether of nations, or the other premises for being here among the beasts, for being any kind at all, a man of brown or beige, a middle age—o middle! Where are you?—a radical, or sister, or resister? All the bodies surge towards to merge. Only the flags and fears pretend to old anachronistic independences but all in all we’re growing more and more related, more familiar in this collectivity, our bloom of group identity and glue, this gravitas conferred on us by planetary etymology, I’d say, among the ever tinier and more discriminable stars. Lament of the Touched For Ellen, first and last Detachment’s being thought achievable is boggling in itself. Its being thought achievable by love, a love for all (not only every) sentience (the human kind and bestial alike) at times appears the precept of intelligences terribly untouched. How much of a hand in things must we promote before relinquishing the things at hand? What kiss of mind would such communal sense permit? A swirl of dust in schools perhaps . . . Slow learners of my ilk must spurn the selving sensualities to feel for feelers of this kind: unfasten passion’s burners to discern whatever’s cooler under it. In short, must court dispassion just to be compassionate.