Laura McCullough is the author or editor of several books, including, most recently, Jersey Mercy. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and magazines. She teaches at Brookdale Community College, and she is the founding editor of Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations.
"Laura McCullough's The Wild Night Dress opens and closes speaking
in a language of science connected to emotion. Love waves, the
aftershocks of earthquakes, and terror waves, the defensive
movements of prey, nicely encapsulate McCullough's exploration of
grief. She reminds us how these effects mirror the scientific
duality of matter as particles and waves, and the entire book
becomes a reflection on how loss happens to us not just in one
instance, but over and over again with each memory of it."
--Theodora Hannan, Mid-American Review, Volume XXXVIII, Number
1
"As much as Laura McCullough's seventh book of poetry The Wild
Night Dress, which was selected by Billy Collins as a finalist for
the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, charts the union of science
and poetry, it also is a profound meditation on hunger and loss.
Throughout the collection, the need to be fed, literally and
figuratively, and the speaker's obligation to feed and sustain
those around her is a recurring theme. These are poems of witness
and survival, as the daily and mundane continue asking of the
speaker, even when she has been stripped of those who sustained her
most."--Kristina Marie Darling, Tupelo Quarterly
"Laura McCullough knows the sacred is all around us: in the words
of a stranger, a hummingbird outside the kitchen window, junk
washed up on a shoreline, finding refuge in the language of
reverie. Raw, stark, vulnerable, these poems confront loss without
sentimentality and turn to the quotidian as a means of resilience.
This collection is a meditation on what it means to carry on,
elegies that radiate with life."--Dorianne Laux
"The colossal fortitude and lyric pitch of Laura McCullough's
intellect in its search to find the figures and music to accompany
the challenges and exuberance of living today leave us sprawling in
wonder at her rich talents and more resilient for she names the
fires that burn inside us. The Wild Night Dress is the indisputable
evidence we need to intercept any doubts about the vibrancy of
contemporary poetry."--Major Jackson
"This poet has the kind of binocular vision that can see the poetic
and scientific aspects of the world simultaneously. . . . this
shuffling together of lyrical/botanical and medical language is
done so gracefully, it has the effect of bringing 'the two
cultures' into a rare state of peaceful coexistence."--Billy
Collins
"What distinguishes Laura McCullough's outstanding The Wild Night
Dress is its refusal to settle for the familiar turns and tropes of
wisdom, the temptations of which must have been pulling at the
edges of every stanza. Instead McCullough commits herself to a
project that's rougher, more daring: a science of her own in which
two concurrent losses--the death of a mother, the end of a long
relationship--become a door to a place she can't yet see. 'I'm
ready to learn another language, a new / syntax.' And that desire
is astonishingly here, poem after poem."--Paul Lisicky
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