Whatever Falls

By Anthony McCann

• Description
• Reviews

• With captivating polyvocality, Anthony McCann’s new book-length poem makes an attentive and expansive record of listening. Written in the woodlands of New York’s Hudson and Mohawk Valleys during a crisis moment in his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease, Whatever Falls leads readers through terrains of forest, hospital, home, and history. Along the way, the poem deftly holds the counterbalance between the neurodivergent linguistic landscape of the poet’s young son who’s learning to play with words and his mother who is rapidly losing hers. Threaded through with entwined historical and ecological resonances, McCann assembles a thoughtful record of relationships to place and transcribes moments of unconventional and unexpected human connection, while attending to the non-human world of the forest as it shapes and carries social relations. In three poetic movements, Whatever Falls builds a testament to care and curiosity.

• Previous Praise:
  

  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