Part empathy, part ferocity in subject and voice, a living, breathing language bobs along like an electric jellyfish —fearless, vital, often urban in the poems in McCullough’s new collection Jersey Mercy. Immersed in various tensions—the sort that McCullough has been teasing out for a decade— these poems seem to be uttered aloud as they unfold. […]
Laura McCullough
Laura McCullough
Laura McCullough’s most recent books of poetry are Rigger Death & Hoist Another, Panic, and Speech Acts. She is the editor of two anthologies, The Room & the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn, Syracuse University Press, fall, 2013, and Poetry and Race: the Task of Un/masking, University of Georgia Press, spring, 2014. She […]
Laura McCullough: Grace & Good Will
On the way home, I stop in the Good Will store in New Brunswick which I have passed going and coming for a couple of weeks while my father has been in the hospital.
Laura McCullough: Button
His hands felt like paws or flippers, big and inarticulate, as if the spaces between shoulder socket and elbow joint and between the finger bones had all fused in the August sun, a kind of annealing, so what had once been uncured now had been except that mobility and utility had been replaced with one […]
Laura McCullough: The Ways Water is Used
Her youngest daughter’s thick curly hair should not be washed every night; she knows this, but her daughter begs her to do it, loves the ritual, the smell of the shampoo and cream rinse. It is becoming a chore, the mother thinks, the child getting big enough to do this herself. Her own hair is […]
Laura McCullough: Begin With a Bifid Tongue
Have you ever had turducken? That’s turkey stuffed with pork stuffed with chicken, a kind of gourmet diglossia, or if you prefer, a glossolalia of protein. All boneless, of course, which is best for the actual eating. Let’s make some, and while we eat it, let’s share whatever words we know in Tamil, Tagalog, Urdu. […]