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.
From Darkening Porches
Poems by Jo McDougall
March 1996
Available In:
Paper: $19.95 (978-1-55728-408-2)
Cloth: $32.95 (978-1-55728-407-5)
“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
