The Gone Thing

Born in rural Texas in 1986, the oldest of seven children, and once described by Craig Teicher of NPR as "the poster-girl for a new generation of poets," McClure revises the nuances of class, race, and clashing identities in a polyvocal style that flows out of her experience as an ambiguous academic turned ambivalent corporate creative; a firsthand witness to rural poverty and its colonial origins; a white Chicana with a vexed position in American society; an educated urbanite with a deep connection to the folklore and wisdom of her agricultural-worker ancestors. THE GONE THING upends traditions of pastoral poetry and bucolic subject matter, using the allegory of land stewardship to sketch a jagged narrative of personal and collective loss. Sometimes self-conscious, often unequivocally sincere, the lines that compose these poems lull and jolt their way across different landscapes: barren political realms, the author's own fertile body, a suffering natural world, and an amnesiac society, in which the speaker works, shops, marvels, suffers, and doesn't die.

"The border is the terrain of Monica McClure's poems, her world a flammable one made of money, work, worth. Her hypnotic stanzas burn with the kind of superheated attention that intensifies sight itself. With the prophetic intimacy and perfect aim of Alice Notley and Chelsey Minnis, McClure's hallucinatory poems press against reality not a mirror but a lit cigarette—as if to see what the real will reveal about itself, now that it's on fire. What can heat teach us. How much hotter can it get."—Joyelle McSweeney

"Monica McClure's close-to-the-bone collection of remembrance and reverie takes you on a skin-scented slow dance through what Keats called the Mansion of Many Apartments, this time with Lana Del Rey's 'National Anthem' spinning softly in the background. So skillfully does McClure dissect the cruel poetics of beauty, loss, love, and the sharp inflection points of class, race, and gender that, to put it quite plainly, this book will slay you in your sleep."—Kim Rosenfield

"Finely crafted but never overworked. This book is everything poetry should be: fresh, alive, surprising; explosive, daring, brutal; honest, searching, hungry."—Ethan Stebbins

"In Monica McClure's extraordinary new book, transformations abound: memories are disinterred into the present as dreamlike miniatures of variously-classed American life, at times mordant, at times severe. Any one thing seems always to be in the process of becoming another. The figures in McClure's poems are not just blurred, they're running. The poems narrate escape, tenuous and vibrating — escape from home, from acute desperation, from a bleak and threatening past that feels increasingly like a future. The 'gone thing' is what is missing and therefore ever-present, the hole burned into one's life by a torch of comprehensive predacity. That you have maybe crawled out of that hole does not delete it; it just leaves you staring back in fearful relief, waiting to slip."—Josef Kaplan

Poetry. Family & Relationships. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies.