Kathleen McGookey

Kathleen McGookey’s prose poems and translations have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best Microfiction 2019, Best Small Fictions 2019, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Field,, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Quiddity, and The Southern Review. The author of four books of poetry and three chapbooks, she has also published We’ll See, a book of translations of French poet Georges Godeau’s prose poems. She has received grants from the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, the Arts Fund of Kalamazoo County, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her poems have appeared on both Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has taught creative writing at Hope College, Interlochen Arts Academy, and Western Michigan University, and lives in Middleville, Michigan, with her family.

Brilliant, illuminating, powerful: Paper Sky is a journey into the state of the unexpected, with lovely (sometimes haunting) surprises along the way. McGookey does it again. Read this. It's yet another marvel by one of the best prose poets of our time. —Kim Chinquee, author of PIPETTE

In these stunning prose poems—full of family and beautiful birds, loss and quiet observation, color and so much light—McGookey has written lines that will blind you with a luminescence that springs from precision and tender attention to detail. —Anne-Marie Oomen

There is such pain and such beauty in Stay, and there are so many astonishing moments of what I can only call distilled reverie, I feel nothing short of awe after reading this collection. —Nin Andrews

Sample Poem from
Paper Sky

Like Startled Sparrows

The clocks fly past the tablecloth sticky with syrup, past the beds rumpled as daisies, past the mason jars filled with pearls and rice, to perch at the windowsills. You can hold your breath but it’s already too late—the daffodils by the foundation have laid down their filmy trumpets while dandelions overtook the field. Grandfather and grandmother have stepped back into their portraits—one stands in the center of the team, holding the championship basketball, the other sits at a little wooden desk, smiling and gripping her pencil.

Sample Prose Poem from
Instructions for My Imposter

February Thaw

All winter, my daughter watched the broken branch in the catalpa print its upside down V on the sky. She stopped waiting for it to fall. Today, frost coats the brittle grasses in the field. They sway like the chatter of grackles when a flock lands at the feeder, all at once. We have only a little snow. Even what I thought was a hawk is just a clump of brown leaves. Both times I was pregnant, I never said, Finally my body contains two hearts. There were two of everything. It was the opposite of romance. Now, I can almost kiss her without bending as she writes Fragile, Handle with Care on a package she wants me to mail.

Sample Prose Poem from
Stay

Still Reticent

May I say I have a secret? Over days, tiny stars bloomed on feathery stems in the field. They had begun as small green knobs. Of course I mean daisies, but may I say this? Mother, may I? I look the same. I act the same. But am I changed? A clock ticks in a small bare room, lit with soft peach light. Some days, the clock looks like an egg. Some days, a pearl. The room is my secret: it is not inside any house. Whether the room is filled with calm is a matter of opinion: the clock grows a pendulum and a square glass face, grows too large to stand up straight, so the pendulum flops like a dying fish; it curls like a comma, like a pink shrimp.

You will not find the door to this room in the same place twice.

Praise for Paper Sky

Reading Kathleen McGookey’s latest collection, Paper Sky, reminds me why I love prose poetry. Sublime, profound, and deeply felt, each poem is like a crystal gem. It’s as if she has taken her everyday life and examined it, detail by detail, as if it were a portal to another realm. Like William Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Killarney Clary, she is a poet who sees the mystery in the ordinary, whose every poem shimmers with light.

—Nin Andrews, author of Son of a Bird

The clouds in Kathleen McGookey's moving prose poems report on a world that's both familiar and uncanny—"Night and day behaved themselves"; "Grandmother and Grandfather have already stepped back into their portraits"; "Dark is dark/ And she is caught in its throat." They illuminate small but crucial moments, and the indistinct things that move at the edge of our peripheral vision. They also reveal the mysteriousness just below the surface of our daily lives, and in doing so transform what we might mistake for the ordinary into art. You'll never see your own life in quite the same way again.

—Sharon Bryan, author of Sharp Stars

Praise for Instructions for My Imposter

Both music and magic flare within Kathleen McGookey’s writing, sparked in part by paradox, by the inherent tension between two contradictory impulses which complement and complicate one another—the lyric and the narrative. Her latest collection, Instructions for My Imposter, is an irresistible read: sixty-three resonant and lovingly polished works that sing their stories with only a few well-chosen details and images. The prose poem is an overnight bag which the writer must pack carefully, given there’s room only for essentials. Most of McGookey’s prose poems run fewer than two hundred words. Crucial in micro-works like these are memorable opening and closing sentences, to hook readers and then leave them with a haunting image—which McGookey delivers, yet she also pays close attention to all the words in between. Her prose poems are burnished and buffed until they shimmer with elegance. Gliding along the edges of a lovely strangeness, they’re the perfect melding of narrative and lyric, story and song.

—Clare MacQueen, founding editor/publisher of KYSO Flash

In these stunning prose poems—full of family and beautiful birds, loss and quiet observation, color and so much light—McGookey has written lines that will blind you with a luminescence that springs from precision and tender attention to detail. Her explorations of daily life are by turns yearning, metaphorical, and grounded in the holy ordinary. They depict moments both earthly and otherworldly. I feel as though I am reading sacred language, our plain human endeavors elevated by the flow of inspired song running under it all.    

—Anne-Marie Oomen, author of Un-Coded Woman

Praise for Stay

There is such pain and such beauty in Stay, and there are so many astonishing moments of what I can only call distilled reverie, I feel nothing short of awe after reading this collection. McGookey's poems shimmer with a profound sense of love and loss and wonder. Each one is like a section of stained glass window. Together they are an illumination.

—Nin Andrews, author of Why God Is a Woman

I love Kathleen McGookey’s prose poems — their tenderness and their strangeness, how the spareness of their language points to both absence and presence, how the poems go, unflinchingly, straight through grief to beauty, how McGookey infuses them with sensuality and the mysteries of life, death, and love. Each of the poems is a small window into a life lived with excruciating awareness to the details of “ordinary” life, each playing out like a fable or a fairytale, each with a kind of aching magic inside it.

—Cecilia Woloch, author of Carpathia

The small spaces of Kathleen McGookey’s intimate prose poems are uncannily expansive. As they move through experiences of caretaking and motherhood, birth and death, grief and anger, wishes and prayers, they challenge ordinary conceptions of what domestic life is and what it can be. Stay casts a spell that slows time down, allowing us to enter the vibrant and variegated texture of real alertness.

—Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine

In her daring new collection, Stay, Kathleen McGookey re-assembles what we, without a nod, pass by every day. In doing so she reveals that—no matter what the arrangement—the world is seamless. Her stunningly uncommon intelligence shows us that if there is order, it can be created from most anything, and yet her fresh and penetrating perceptions are never arbitrary. These poems leave us refreshingly off-kilter and deeply grateful that we have been invited to stay.

—Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron