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Melanie McCabe's third collection moves like a record, cyclical and singing. These elegiac poems turn over the tender and fraught intimacy of two sisters-one gone and one left to tell their story. The reader is invited into their shared history via a wonderfully precise imagination that is grounded in the real. This speaker is haunted, not by spirits, but by the physical world that her sister has departed, as in the opening of "Days That Should Have Been Yours": "Damp earth and honeysuckle rise into the air / I am left with." Each poem brims with a quiet intensity. As a collection, they hover like a murmuration-cohesive, sensual, just high enough to see everything clearly.
-Danielle Cadena Deulen, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us
About the author
Melanie McCabe's poetry collection, What The Neighbors Know, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2014, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Library of Virginia's Literary Awards competition. Her first collection, History of the Body, was published by David Robert Books in 2012. Her nonfiction book, His Other Life: Searching for My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, and a feature article about it appeared in The Washington Post in December of 2017. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Threepenny Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Her work has also appeared on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in Best New Poets 2010. She lives in Falls Church, Virginia, and taught high school English for twenty-two years.
