What You Want

(Paperback)

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Description

The wry, searching new collection by National Book Award finalist Maureen N. McLane, musing on the sea, ageing, love and the climate crisis In her first book of poems since What I'm Looking For- Selected Poems 2005-2017, Maureen N. McLane offers a bravura collection of perceptive poetic meditations. What You Want is a book of landscapes, mindscapes, and shifting moods. Here are poems filled with gulls and harbours, blinking red lights and empty lobster traps, beach roses and rumoured sharks, eels and crows, wind turbines and superhighways. Sensitive, lyrical, alert to seasons and pressures on our shared life, McLane registers and gives form to an ambient unease. From Sappho to Constable, from constellations to microplastics, What You Want is a book alive to the cosmos as well as to our moment, with its many vexations and intermittent illuminations. With strong command and delicate invitation, McLane moves from swift notations to powerfully sustained sequences, testing what (if anything) might 'outlast the coming heat'. And meanwhile, 'There's no end / to beauty and shit'.

Author Bio

Raised in upstate New York, Maureen N. McLane is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including This Blue (2014), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Some Say (2017); What I'm Looking For- Selected Poems 2005-2017 was published by Penguin Books in 2019. Her book My Poets, a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Oxford and the University of Chicago, and teaches poetry and poetics at New York University.