Thing Music

Anthony McCann will be present and giving readings at AWP in February, 2014. Co-op available. Poems from this book have appeared in MAKE Magazine, A Public Space, BOMB online, and a few smaller journals with a dedicated readership of young poets. He's recently had interviews in The Los Angeles Review of Books (with Catherine Wagner) and the Kenyon Review. We'll pitch features and reviews to magazines and journals that have a strong readership of poets and artists, mostly MFA students or graduates, such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Believer, Pleiades, The Constant Critic, and The Volta. We'll also target venues for the L.A. area like the L.A. Times and the L.A. Weekly. We will promote this book on McCann's author page, through social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and on our homepage.

Resounding poems of being as being-in-the-world, with personhood inextricable from landscape, language, and culture."The poems of Anthony McCann are beautiful, brutal, and unerring. They present us with, or return us to, a complicated, violent, poignant, weird, and mysterious world--a world which is very particularly his, and also our own, re-sung. For some time now I have believed McCann to be one of the finest poets writing today."--Maggie Nelson "McCann demonstrates that the truth surrounds us all; our best way of connecting with it is through compassion and love. With equal parts exuberance and dread, the speaker encourages us to 'waste the whole day feeling these things.'"--Boston Review Thing Music is full of flesh, of creatures tangled in their worlds. Marked variously by the desert and coastal landscapes of Southern California and the intersections of phenomenology and anarchism, these poems are porous bodies, traversed by light and noise. From "Mouth Guitar": Now the pulsing afternoon takes each belly in its hands lifts it up towards some glass and all that's inside While he crawled on with his body towards vengeance or the state Anthony McCann lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the University of California-Riverside's Palm Desert MFA program. He is the "Poet Laureate" of Machine Project, and also teaches courses at the California Institute of the Arts.