Pattie McCarthy

Quiet Book Pattie McCarthy

Poetry. Pattie McCarthy's QUIET BOOK keeps its steady gaze trained on the mother/child unit--from the inside out and back in again. In gorgeous poems of formal range and daring, McCarthy gives us birth and motherhood like no other writer--she is unafraid, she is wry and at times she is deeply tender. This is the 'everyday opera' of real life: the drama of bodies as matter of fact, the essential material of being human. In the book's third and brilliant section, a series of ekphrastic poems on mostly fifteenth and sixteenth paintings of women and children remind us that the breast, the mouth, the food, the hands, the labor--these attributes of human life are indeed timeless. We look at the past to find ourselves, and what we find in ourselves is exhaustion, which is love, which is power.--Julie Carr

If the body is the soul, what of that to which a body gives birth? Pattie McCarthy's remarkable QUIET BOOK interrogates what is made, what is received, and what is unknown. Charting English as 'a daughter language, ' McCarthy skillfully tracks etymologies, figurations, images, forms, and functions of the feminine as bodily experience and as aesthetic encounter. This brilliantly moving collection challenges our received grammars of representation and calls for a reinvention of our domestic spaces, a recalibration of our collective interiority.--Tonya Foster