Böcker av Anthony McCann

With tender attention and a keenly embodied curiosity, the poems in I am the dead, who, you take care of me are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead. Following the poet's recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is "a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat."  By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, Anthony McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. "I want life/but for the living" he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these are works which ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.

Los Angeles Times BestsellerAn ΓÇ£epic explorationΓÇ¥ of the 2016 right-wing Oregon OccupationΓÇö"an excellent microcosm by which we might better understand our difficult national history and distressing political momentΓÇ¥ (Maggie Nelson).In 2016, a group of armed, divinely inspired right-wing protestors led by Ammon Bundy occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Encamped in the shadowlands of the republic, insisting that the Federal government had no right to own public land, the occupiers were seen by a divided country as either dangerous extremists dressed up as cowboys, or as heroes insisting on restoring the rule of the Constitution. From the OccupationΓÇÖs beginnings, to the trials of the occupiers in federal court in downtown Portland and their tumultuous aftermaths, Shadowlands is the resonant, multifaceted story of one of the most dramatic flashpoints in the year that gave us Donald Trump.Sharing the expansive stage with the occupiers are a host of othersΓÇöNative American tribal leaders, public-lands ranchers, militia members, environmentalists, federal defense attorneys, and Black Lives Matter activistsΓÇöeach contending in their different ways with the meaning of the American promise of Liberty. Gathering into its vortex the realities of social media technology, history, religion, race, and the environmentΓÇöthis piercing work by Anthony McCann offers us a combination of beautiful writing and high-stakes analysis of our current cultural and political moment. Shadowlands is a clarifying, exhilarating story of a nation facing an uncertain future and a murky past in a time of great collective reckoning.

LA-based poet returns with humor, irreverence, and sincere longing to sever the distinction between dream and reality, person and animal.

Forceful, fractured, clear poems weave through an apocalyptic contemporary landscape: fear, irreverent humor and deep sadness.