August 30th
Late at night, a child next to me in bed, I’m dreaming I’m standing in grief’s house. He’s before me, calling me babe, a cigarette in his hand, my other daughter’s rainbow above us, framed, perpendicular to the flowered ground, red blooms that glow, a yellow and blue bird hung in the sky like a window or a heart.
September 4th
I’m not sure I want it to be fall. There’s a cool breeze. No one’s home. Late afternoon. I’m longing for something like you. The weekend has splayed out with its accidents and tolls. The top of my wrist heals from the burn of the dog’s leash. And my heart from watching in the dark blue hotel room with Tom a movie, Stigmata, while the girls slept behind us in bed and we huddled on the floor deeply engrossed after a day of wandering, questions, frustration, alone in a city we no longer belong to, having gone there for reprieve only to find that the highlight, the thing that would make the most sense was a deeply fictional movie we landed upon at random, a movie about a contemporary atheist bearing the wounds of god, a Christ who didn’t speak any of the words known. But what do I know? You are my witness. What do I know?
Between September 4th and 5th
Terrified I’m asleep, about to wake up an old woman having made wrong choice after wrong choice or having made no choice at all, I’m about to approach Tom: Do you think? Am I? I know what you’re going to say, Be careful. And I never wanted politics to enter in, at least knowingly. But you’re asking me. Children, children, I’m combing their hair and handing them over to Tom. Did you know I did that? Did you see the imprint of their blankets on my skin? Did you know how hard it was, each time, harder still, all so I could write, fall asleep on the half-written page, exhausted with grief?
70 Pages
$15
isbn 0-9745909-1-6
Katherine McCord’s moving sequence of prose poems, Living Room, expresses truthfully and with poignant, even painful clarity the trials and triumphs of a life claimed by conflicting loves: love of writing, love of husband and children. She gives us a year of this life, and it is a privilege to experience it through her evocative, passionate language.
—Kelly Cherry, author of Rising Venus: Poems
About Katherine McCord’s first book of poetry, Island, also published by March Street Press, David St. John wrote: “The pared inscription, as well as the delicacy and discretion…are always deeply compelling and often breathtaking. The honorable simplicity of this work rewards us time and time again with both wisdom and delight. Quietly elegant, and as intimate as a whisper, this is a book to hold close in the silence of the night.”
Marianne Boruch wrote: “[Katherine McCord] is a remarkable poet whose work is certain and hesitant at once, compressed and expansive. She wants silence to speak as carefully as her words. She sees poetry in the purest sense, working toward pieces where important things aren’t merely described or reported but transformed. Katherine McCord is an artist, through and through, taking aspects of ordinary life and finding fear and wonder in them.”
Robert Bixby wrote: “Sometimes from dry ground some of the most important and exciting poetry springs. From the saturated reds and greens of New Mexico comes the moving lyric of a life told in poems. Katherine McCord’s poems captured me from the first line…and carried me through her autobiography in poems. I knew it was a book I had to pay attention to and it’s a collection I am proud to have had some small part in bringing to the public. It’s the big emptiness of the desert sky crying out to be filled that pulls these lines from the poet’s heart. It’s a cool cloth on the dying man’s brow, the only comfort for miles and the only comfort needed.”
Katherine McCord has published widely in literary journals and magazines. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing/Poetry. She teaches Creative Writing/Poetry at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Living Room, her second book, chronicles, in prose poems, one year in the life of a writing mother.