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  • Anthony McCann is the author of five volumes of poetry including I am the dead, who, you take care of me (November 2023), and Thing Music (Wave Books, 2014). His non-fiction prose work, Shadowlands—on the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge—was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Reading the West Award. Anthony is the current director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives with this family in the Mojave Desert. 

  • Reviews
    McCann demonstrates that the truth surrounds us all; our best way of connecting with it is through compassion and love. With equal parts exuberance and dread, the speaker encourages us to “waste the whole day feeling these things.”
    Nate Pritts, Boston Review

    For McCann, a poem is a thing capable of astonishing a reader, as well as a thing able to represent the astonishment of its speaker. As a result, speaker and reader alike are willing to remain in the position of observers of beauty, both of objects and the language which colors them.
    Jennifer Moore, Another Chicago Magazine

    You might not “get” exactly what he is saying but you will feel what he is meaning. You will be moved by something pre-historic and radiant. Which is to say: you will be moved by this mysterious, lyric, ecstatic thing: poetry.
    Matthew Dickman, Tin House

    Reviews of books by Anthony McCann

    Thing Music

    I ♥ Your Fate

    Moongarden

  • Poems
    - Eight poems (in The Brooklyn Rail)
    - “This Living Hand” (in Spoke to Soon)
    - “The Day” (in PEN America)
    - “Mouth Guitar,” with commentary (at the Poetry Society of America)
    - Three Poems (in Ghost Town)
    - Four poems (in The Brooklyn Rail)
    - Five poems, and a poetics statement with seven poems (in H_NGM_N)
    - “Woe to the Wildebeest, Whose Flesh Is to Be Torn” (in Verse Daily)

    Interviews and Discussions
    - Anthony McCann interviews himself at The Nervous Breakdown
    - Fanzine, with Andrew James Weatherhead
    - Anthony McCann and Matthew Rohrer interview each other at Studio One

    Articles
    - “Open Door” article about Ljubljana for The Poetry Foundation

  • Audio



    - “Mouth Guitar” at PennSound
    - “Let The Right One In” at PennSound
    - Reading for Machine Project's Mystery Theater Poetry Archives:


    Video
    Anthony McCann reads from I AM THE DEAD, WHO, YOU TAKE CARE OF ME in Joshua Tree, CA.

    Reading at City Lights Books:

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