From Darkening Porches

About

In just five lines, Jo McDougall can make you shudder. Her poems are often as stark and open as their settings—the Kansas plains and Southern bottomlands. But in these wide fields and hot kitchens, on these front porches where ordinary people tell their stories, the everyday becomes fabled, truth becomes hallowed. To C. D. Wright, McDougall writes “a lean, stoic line; each poem makes its mark, like spit.” In those lines, McDougall brings to life farmers, dressmakers, widows, and waitresses with such precise clarity that we take part in the strange delights, the struggles, the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.

Author

Jo McDougall is an Arkansas Delta poet who has authored seven books of poetry, including In the Home of the Famous Dead, Towns Facing Railroads, and From Darkening Porches, and a memoir, Daddy’s Money. In 2018, McDougall was awarded the Porter Fund’s Lifetime Achievement Award, given every five years to an established Arkansas writer. She also served as the Poet Laureate of Arkansas from 2018 to 2022. She lives in Little Rock with her husband.

Author website.

Praise

“Imagine a song . . . performed on dobro, cello, and the spoons. Jo McDougall’s style is just such a combination of strangeness, elegance, and homely contrivance. She is as meticulous and impersonal as Ted Kooser, as brooding as Jim Barnes, but in the elliptical and fractured narratives of From Darkening Porches she is also wholly her own poet, for whom our blighted small towns render a minimalist stage for her characters’ performances of desire and destitution. These people endure with so much patience, they see ‘past brightening houses,’ all the way to the darkened ends of their lives.”
—David Baker, author of Changeable Thunder and Talk Poetry