I am the dead, who, you take care of me
I am the dead, who, you take care of me
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With tender attention and a keenly embodied curiosity, the poems in I am the dead, who, you take care of me are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead. Following the poet’s recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is “a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat.” By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, Anthony McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. “I want life—but for the living” he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these are works which ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.
Supplemental author notes for I am the dead, who, you take care of me -
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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 (Bloomsbury, 2019)—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.
Publication: November 2023
ISBN# 9781950268887 (6 x 8, 64pp, paperback)