“My Poetics will be an essential, enduring resource for readers and practitioners of poetry.”
― Margaret Ronda, author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End
Acclaimed poet and critic Maureen N. McLane offers an experimental work of criticism ranging across Romantic and contemporary poetry.
In My Poetics, Maureen N. McLane writes as a poet, critic, theorist, and scholar—but above all as an impassioned reader. Written in an innovative, conversable style, McLane’s essays illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass.
“McLane’s spirited defense of poetics is a speculative ballad of clamorous voices approaching, yet averting, the sublime. ”
― Charles Bernstein, author of Topsy-Turvy
“It is possible to be carried so far by McLane—by her knowledge, wit, generosity, and musical ear—that one is carried away . . . Her vistas are democratic but unmonumental."
—Christine Smallwood, Harper's
“The unstoppable, riverish fever of her enjambed, short-lined poems quickly draws one down through her mind, which is as good a prism as any I know of to encounter the external "effects" of nature, beauty, body . . .”
–Adam Fitzgerald, Lithub
“I don't recommend Maureen N. McLane as much as proselytize for her. She's my favourite living poet . . . [Her work] bristles with life, feeling, argument.”
–Parul Sehgal, THE New York Times Book Review
BIO
Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. Raised in upstate New York, she holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. She has published eight books of poetry: Same Life (FSG, 2008), Finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award; World Enough (FSG, 2010); This Blue (FSG, 2014), Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry; Mz N: the serial (FSG, 2016); Some Say (FSG, 2017, Finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and for The Believer Award in Poetry; What I’m Looking For: Selected Poems (Penguin UK, 2019); More Anon: Selected Poems (FSG, 2021), and What You Want (FSG and Penguin UK, 2023). Her most recent book–part of her ongoing experiment in criticism–is My Poetics (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Her book My Poets (FSG, 2012), an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a New York Times Notable Book and Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. Her poems have appeared in e.g. Bomb, Granta, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and PN Review; her work has been translated into Czech, French, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. McLane has also published two critical monographs on British romantic poetics and numerous essays on Anglophone poetics, balladry, and mediality. Her writing on contemporary literature and culture has appeared in (among other venues) Boston Review, The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and Public Books. In 2003 she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. Other honors include a Rhodes Scholarship; fellowships at Harvard’s Society of Fellows and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin); and residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, Santa Maddalena, TS Eliot House, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. She is Professor of English at New York University. She has, as of yet, no tattoos.