Tracey McTague's
SUPER NATURAL is now available from Trembling Pillow Press.
Also available as an
ebook for Kindle.
Advance Praise for SUPER NATURAL:
“A hornbook for the
fledgling seer. A trickster’s bible. Mystic, domestic, ritualistic, caustic.
Tracey McTague’s book invokes the spaces between the worlds with poems that
demand to be read aloud, incantations against—or for—those liminal places where
spirits flap free. With sensual vulgarity and profane beauty, her poems draw
close to the divine, stripping language down to its glowing bones. I know this
place; it stalks me. And I believe in these poems”
-Lauren Ireland
“Edgar Allen Poe famously
wrote, “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the
proportion.” Indeed, stare for too long at any gorgeous flower and one begins
to be stunned by its essential grotesquerie, which then in some mysterious way
doubles back to make the blossom more beautiful still. Similarly, Tracey
McTague’s poems tinker with the proportion of beauty to strangeness, finding
just the right balance, as a Thai chef might with sweetness, acidity, salt, and
spiciness.
It just so happens that
Tracey has one of the most beautiful gardens in Brooklyn…I’m not sure whether
she has transferred the skill set of gardening into poetry or vice versa, or
whether the dynamic is simply more complementary, but the poems are like
enchanted terrariums, tiny organic assemblages in the “syntax of [an] unknown
tongue.”
The lines are short and
this economy helps us not to lose such exquisite, sound-attentive moments as
“prank mask feasts,” “double bloom Twombly,’ “porch minks,” and “faux pas paw
prints.” I almost want to call these “euphoria infested” poems gemlike, with
their strange and unembarrassed (i.e. uncontested) beauty, but perhaps it is
more accurate to compare them to amber. With her fine and surreal sense of
juxtaposition and arrangement, Tracey is sure to work in insects and delicate
mischief among the loveliness: there is a “nymph detainment center”, a
“chocolate mingle turn-ons at herpes camp” and even a “Cartesian spider monkey
[that] yells,
‘Titans – show us your
tits’”!
To which one can only
respond:
Tracey! Show us your
poems!”
-Nada Gordon
Tracey McTague is
a “sorceress in sweet depravity/ & general decay.” She calls forth a world
crowded with the debris of daily life, lit by “the wide-eyed radiance” of the
poet’s mind: Antigone brand condoms and H.R. department emoticons.
These poems brim with
wonder, but also warning. They gather global gods and folk rituals, as if the
present, or, more precisely, the future, required the resurrection of every
possible power — hope here residing not above us but in the ways such prayers
access “the primordial wisdom in the world as it is.”
-Allison Cobb
Tracey
McTague is a streetwise detective of the most unusual details; some
of her poems read like a pile of stuff discovered in an alley -- mysterious,
then interesting, then meaningful, beautiful, and rewarding to the careful eye.
Other poems seem channeled from the distant flare of a blinking star; on
top of her Brooklyn hill, McTague is a strangely-alloyed antennae picking up
eons-old cosmic messages. My favorite poems are the ones that
demand to be reread. As soon as I finished this book, I started it anew.
-Shafer Hall
Tracey McTague’s
amazing collection of poetry Supernatural, fires up the language. Folklore,
nature, and the quotidian meld into bars of gold and silver. These poems
dedicated to family and friends, lift off the page and light up poetry’s sky.
Grounded in folklore, McTague’s poems can’t be nailed to the wall, they are
tricksters, shape shifters that defy our expectations and rules.
-Brenda Coultas
Delivered
with the spontaneous mind of "first thought best thought," each word
is also a well wrought amulet stowed in the shelves of the poem. It's their
sense of strangeness, vast associative possibility and sonic kinkiness that
makes me feel we can use them as chants to combat commonplace wrong-doers. As
she writes, "bird-herald appears/making a joyful noise/& always pays
your debts."
-Stacy
Szymaszek
