Kathleen McClung

Poetrylandia, Issue 5, "Three Soul-Makers: Poems That Bring Us Together" Darkly beautiful, erotic, lyrical and haunting poems inspired by experiences of love and loss, this collection carries readers across time, geography, and interior space to embrace both the pain and beauty of living fully in an ever-changing world. Mary Kennedy Eastham's work has been called darkly beautiful, erotic, lyrical and haunting. One reviewer said sitting down with her poems blew his hair back flat, reminding him of when he was in high school, laying in the grass at the end of the runway as the jets took off. In the poem The Shadow of A Dog I Can't Forget, a woman, married for only 60 days, deals with feelings of melancholy by inventing a mysterious dog only she can see. Mary Eastham carefully crafts a world of runaways, mystical goddesses, happy strippers, and Marilyn Monroe returned to us to comment on her life being auctioned away. The poet's words nag at us the way only a great seduction can...like liquid pearls falling from the sky above/as soft and easy as a fortune teller's dreams/We are beautiful alone with ourselves/they seem to say/evening snowflakes floating beneath a faint moon/like fingertips about to touch/a new piano/each sound, each song/a miracle.Mary Kennedy Eastham's book The Shadow of A Dog I Can't Forget - Poems & Prose was a Best Books Award Finalist, a Celebrity Achiever Winner, a Runner-Up for Best Poetry Book and was a Wild Card Runner Up in the Paris and Amsterdam Book Festivals. Points of Love, a poem from that book was a recent Writer's Digest Poetry Winner, a San Francisco Dancing Poetry Winner and a $5,000 winner in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She has gotten two generous writer's award grants from the Arts Council Silicon Valley. She is working on her third book of flash fiction titled Little Earthquakes. She teaches College Essay Seminars in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the Flash Fiction Judge for the San Francisco Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition. Eileen Malone grew up in England, Ireland and Australia and now lives in the coastal fog at the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems and stories have been published in over 500 literary journals and anthologies, a significant amount of which have earned awards, i.e., four Pushcart nominations. She has published four poetry collections and a book on writing groups and taught with the California Poets in the Schools and Community Colleges. A mental health activist, Eileen wrote these poems inspired by her experiences with her adult son diagnosed with schizophrenia at nineteen. She speaks for those who cannot or dare not: the families and loved ones of those with serious mental illnesses. You are not alone, they call out, we feel your pain, your love and loss, we listen, care, make loving human connections. We know tragedy and still we endure. Together, we sing our pain. www.eileenmalone.us and www.soulmakingcontest.us Kathleen McClung's books include Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly, Almost the Rowboat, and A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, winner of the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Her award-winning poems appear widely in journals and anthologies. McClung teaches at Skyline College where she directed the annual Women on Writing conference for ten years. Assistant director of the Soul-Making Keats literary competition, she was a 2018-19 writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. www.kathleenmcclung.com This collection carries readers across time, geography, and interior space. Poems move from the Cuban missile crisis to the Covid-19 crisis, from hospitals and cemeteries to spring sidewalks of Barcelona and San Francisco, from the zestful curiosity of childhood to the wry wisdom of age. McClung harnesses a variety of poetic forms-sonnets, centos, villanelles, sestinas, and others-to embrace both the pain and beauty of living fully in an ever-changing world.More information at www.WapshottPress.org

"Kathleen McClung is a master of the sonnet crown. In her skilled hands, that venerable form expands to encompass active shooter drills, smartphones, and Lyft drivers, as well as songbirds, the sea, and the moon. Even the structure of Temporary Kin-four sonnet crowns linked together by single villanelles-forms a circle, a daisy chain, a fifth and final crown. Like the speaker of one of her poems, McClung knows that there is an ancient magic to 'seasons, cycles, wheels that spin unseen / far longer than our brief mortality.'" Julie Kane, author of Jazz Funeral and Mothers of Ireland, co-editor of Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse.

I have long admired Kathleen McClung's sonnet crowns. How happy I was, then, to be surprised by her skill with the sestina, one that she writes with a traditionalist's sense of meter and a contemporary poet's sense of the conversational. I was also delighted by her boldness in including several sestinas in her volume, along with her crowns. The book, in fact, should be required reading for the achievement of her forms alone. Yet, to this, she adds an almost religious approach to life, where there is a sense of the sacred about the world's idiosyncrasies and activities, whether shredding documents or washing down wheelchairs. The last line of the title poem, "I am the fox, alert, leaping," is a symbol of McClung herself. The enormity of her technical skill in The Typists Play Monopoly is awe-inspiring, but, when combined with her message, it is her genius. -Kim Bridgford, editor, Mezzo Cammin; author of Doll It takes a rare poet to write poems like these, using traditional verse forms to honor the lives we don't see. In sestinas, villanelles, centos, and three masterful crowns of sonnets, Kathleen McClung chronicles what we might otherwise miss with compassion, intelligence and sure-footed grace. In poems by turns devastating and witty, this collection draws our attention to "what breathes beneath the veils" to witness the lives unfolding in rented houses and back alleys. McClung won't avert her gaze-and won't let us either-burnishing her real and imagined subjects until they shine, luminous against the dark. I don't know which I admire more: the mastery of craft or the perceptive sensibility of the poet. -Holly J. Hughes, author of Sailing by Ravens and Passings Not a collection of poems, but a compendium of memories woven so tightly into a unified longing that it is easy to forget we are looking at a life other than our own, Kathleen McClung's first book, The Typists Play Monopoly, is a wondrous example of how to loop a mesmerizing arc through a body of work. Many of the poems resemble vignettes, or short theatre pieces, as McClung opens and closes the door on remembrances that ache in their brightness, pulse with their inability to relinquish the stage in her head. Precise imagery and taut language unearth the landscape our own subconscious knows of our hometowns, then repurposes, repopulates our recollections with these new, exciting-and, often, eerily tragic-characters from a northern California of unabashed disquiet and beauty. -Indigo Moor, Sacramento Poet Laureate