Praise for Dibs: A Train of Thought

Clint McCown’s new book-length poem, Dibs: A Train of Thought, inspired by the works of his early friend and mentor A.R. Ammons, takes its readers on a breathless, witty, whimsical, and ultimately wise journey through the wild and wildly unpredictable experience of being a self, a mind, on the move. Part epic, part aphorism, stacked with dogs, spiders, snakes, odd facts, childhood memories, and observations, McCown’s slyly philosophical boxcars carry us into the domain of mystery and call into question the borders between now and then, reader and writer, self and others. Where do all the birds go away to die? What is the difference between a wish and a hope? From the moment we leave the station, we are held in a mesmerizing rhythm of speculation. What is the difference between a window and a mirror?  This is a voyage no one should miss!

―Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City, National Book Award finalist 

The journey we are taken on by Clint McCown is the imprint of a deep mind thinking hard and long, and at times, quite beautifully, about our world and the living beings within it. He is just that sort of strange, brilliant, and humble mind needed to engine onward through insight and lyric and all that language can do to lay down a passage through a well-lived life.

―Julia Levine, author of Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction 

Edgar Allan Poe believed that a lyric poem cannot sustain the necessary intensity beyond a length of 100 lines. Here in Dibs, Clint McCown begs to differ, offering us a strand of figurative and epiphanic moments on a very compelling discursive thread. I use the term discursive in the best sense of that word; Dibs is a circuitous, meandering meditation on common human experience that ultimately exposes McCown’s uncommonly perceptive and lyrical poetic sensibility. To my mind, his mind proves to be great good company, and his book is a rich, lively, unpredictable journey well worth embarking on.

―Mark Cox, author of Readiness and Knowing

Clint McCown’s original and magnificent Dibs explores how “the mind expands / from what to why,” while adding a deftly quiet drama, for McCown is a kind of poetic “hoarder” countering the way the world is “always / falling/away from us.” With an engaging conversational style along a narrow “train of thought,” Dibs carries us through science and cosmology, the nature of language and metaphor, dream and reality, and from trailer parks to East Germany, Hamlet to Buddhism, and so much more, all the time worrying about everyday issues such as the right tape to fix plumbing. It is his voice, and an impeccable sense of the short line that engages us as if we were sitting across the table in a pub, calling out “dibs” on some subject, sometimes revealing autobiographical details, always weaving in a stream of conscious manner, and yet always hoping for a “unified theory / of everything.” As he tells us at one point, “starting anywhere / you can go / anywhere,” and we do, to a whole new vison of what poetry can do.

―Richard Jackson, author of Footprints and The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems