Small Murders
Carrie McGath
“Carrie McGath is, to borrow her own words, a ‘happy woman of
knots.’ In her poems you will meet a windshield vandal whose weapon
is lipstick in the shade of Fire Engine #45; a coveter of murdered dolls;
a dashboard Mary who's been jilted; a doctor who holds up a newborn ‘like
fresh catch off a pier’; Frida Kahlo folded up in somebody's sock
drawer. You will encounter rape and ruination, sadness, dissection, miracles.
These ruthlessly unsentimental, dark, angry-funny poems are spoken by
‘the loneliest girl in the time-zone’ and proferred—she
pulls it off somehow—with an irrepressible good cheer.”
—Nancy Eimers
“These poems
restore the sense of tension to the present tense, as their speakers contemplate
unsettling hallucinatory events and impressions. Beneath this restless,
disoriented, ‘terrifyingly calm’ voice you can detect a muted
hysteria clenching and muttering like Edgar Allan Poe on Zoloft at 4 A.M
Something not quite usual is pulsing away here, curled up in the glovebox,
the closet, the chest of drawers, and it has something personal and pointed
to say. Meet Carrie McGath’s spooky entourage of mannequins, dolls,
libidinous objects, figures and effigies that alternately interrogate
and judge, constantly threatening to leave, and threatening never to leave.
Then try—you can always try—to forget them.”
—J. Allyn Rosser
“‘You Are
a Rifle in My Closet’ is a strangely strong poem that develops its
haunting metaphor to lament and protest an endlessly deferred possibility
of fulfillment. In ‘Two Men in Sepia Came to Me,’ another outstanding
poem, the speaker has responded to such frustration by sinking into an
inner world of phantasmagorical passion. McGath taps into deep metaphoric
veins in these poems.”
—Mark Halliday
"Juxtaposing
imagery of fractured delicacy, birds' wings, eggshells and doll's heads,
with uncompromising hardness of gun barrels and wooden chests, she captures
an uncanny world where a semblance of normality veils overripe fantasies
and violence."
—Aisha Motiani, Milwaukee's Shepherd Express
New
Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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