Concord Poetry at the Library Series presents

Reimagining Inheritance & Leaving Our Children A Different Song

Nathan McClain

Sunday, February 2 from 3:00-4:15 PM

The Goodwin Forum, Main Branch

With book signings and light refreshments

PLEASE REGISTER BELOW FOR A SEAT IN THE FORUM

Join us for an afternoon of celebrating Black History Month with multi-honored poet, editor, and educator Nathan McClain who will read and engage in a Q & A about his daring sophomore collection, Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award. In these poems McClain interrogates his speaker’s American heritage, history, and responsibility, investigating myth, popular culture, governance, and more. Also, he joins complex pastorals to the stunning sequence entitled “They said I was an alternate,” which recounts the author’s experience serving on jury duty.

Among critical reviews for Previously Owned:

Nathan McClain’s Previously Owned is no-nonsense, meat and potatoes, good gotdam poetry. Careful readers will appreciate how exquisitely crafted are his lines, how resonant his images, how thoughtful his progressions. What’s more, McClain’s second volume shows us a writer who, like Robert Hayden before him, neither ignores nor is encumbered by his country’s complicated history. His topics range widely and the whole of the human landscape—physical, psychological—is his, and ours, for the roaming. — John Murillo

The opening poem of Nathan McClain’s Previously Owned operates like the legend of a map, a key to the book’s existential topography. The poem’s presenting subject is a Roman sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, or ‘not pulling / rather, about to pull.’ McClain addresses the self via the second person, and draws in the reader, too, as observer: ‘and here you / are, looking,’ witness to the boy’s ‘insistent grief.’ ‘And what // have you learned from / standing here so long examining pain?’ Previously Owned exists in this incremental space—the about to pull, the almost, the grief, the tenderness, the examination, and the distance. It’s a masterstroke in a masterful collection, in which a speaker of a nuanced intelligence and lush interiority reflects upon the American landscape, its pastoral and judicial and historical duplicity entwined with racial alienation and violence. McClain has written a collection of sculptural artfulness—through which the thorn of grief thrums still. — Diane Seuss

In Previously Owned, America’s dark history is not quaintly rooted in the past, but dangerously ever-present. ‘And what / have you learned from / standing here so long / examining pain?’ Nathan McClain questions in the opening poem ‘Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot’—not just the reader—himself as witness. If Scale, his first collection, can be said to be anchored in domestic space, then Previously Owned expands the architecture of that domestic space to include Country and the country. The ways in which McClain troubles the pastoral and peripatetic traditions thrills me: ‘I’ve never actually seen a moose, / only signs warning of moose, / and NO PASSING ZONE signs’ (‘Where the View Was Clearer’); and of the fireflies in ‘Now that I live in this part of the country,’ ‘look, they / flash the way hazard / lights sometimes flash… / and I might have said, no, / don’t they seem to pulse / with the glow of old / grievances?’ This book is a triumph and will be talked about for years. Nathan McClain is one of the most daring poets I know. — Tommye Blount

About Nathan McClain

Nathan McClain (he/him) is the author of two collections of poetry: Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award and an Honorable Mention for the Royal Dragonfly Contest, and Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) which was a Silver Winner for the Human Relations Indie Book Award. He is a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a Cave Canem fellow. He earned an MFA from the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and completed his undergraduate studies at UCLA. His poems and prose have appeared in Plume Poetry 10, Poetry Daily, The Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, and Zócalo Public Square, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.

Learn more about Nathan at his website: https://www.nathanmcclain.com/

Photo Credit: Moe Nazemi Photography

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, a patron-supported non-profit organization.
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