Interview With Rose McLarney From The Collagist: Online Literature From Dzanc Books

Four Way Books couldn't be more excited about publishing Rose McLarney's book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains this year. Here is an excerpt from an interview with this great poet from The Collagist: Online Literature From Dzanc Books. Enjoy!

"The truth is that I spend much of my time reading history, folklore, biology, etc., because that material, and real hand work and listening to real people talk, are what prompt me to write. I want to give an answer that is planned to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of my literary background, but it would probably have the opposite of the intended effect.

So I’ll just tell you what one book I happen to be reading today: Charles Wright. He grew up in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee, so he makes references to places in which I am at home. But then he takes them so far beyond the familiar—and the earthly—to something transcendent. For instance, I turn to the poem “Chickamaugua” and I read: “History handles our past like spoiled fruit. / Mid-morning, late-century light / calicoed under the peach trees. / Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here. / The poem is a code with no message: The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath, / Absolute, incommunicado, / unhoused and peregrine.” This is not the rallying cry for the old South I might expect from something bearing the name ‘Chickamauga,” but a poem of more enduring and far reaching ideas.

He makes huge statements such as, “ A love of landscape’s a true affection for regret, I’ve found,/ Forever joined, forever apart,” and I think, well, in two lines he’s summed up everything I’ve tried, in so many ways, to say. And the next poem of his I read will deliver a statement just as strong."

To read more of the interview, click here. Remember to keep an eye on our website to see the arrival of Rose's book and more at Four Way Books!