An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selves Honest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others. In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.

Kyle McCord's Galley of the Beloved in Torment bears the standard of les poetes maudits, the accursed poets, of Rimbaud, Corbiere, Mallarme, et al., and of their forefather Baudelaire. Like the speaker in many of McCord's poems, these fi n-de-siecle poets thrive in the outskirts, fi ngering the hem of society, free to witness her unraveling. Although McCord wrote Galley of the Beloved in Torment some 125 years aft er this time, his book parades the same Decadent style, a style indicative of high sentence, sensuality, social deviance, and the bizarre, to name a few, but enough to stoke our, as Marlow said in Heart of Darkness, "fascination of the abomination." -Ezekiel Black Kyle McCord is a wickedly lavish poet. His scope is broad, his syllables exactingly chosen. The Galley of the Beloved in Torment brings us the pleasure of fable, the "hot breath of one rock on another," the spectacle of life transformed. -Noy Holland Kyle McCord delicately folds promises, prophecies, laments, lists and directives into poems that exhibit both high mastery and intense earnestness. Lines shift and vary in unpredictable ways, as do the poems' speakers, who observe, summon, question, caution, and - above all else - morph. The line between man's best and beast repeatedly blurs. The personal terrifyingly melts into the global in an intimate overlay. Galley of the Beloved in Torment is not love poetry, nor political poetry, nor philosophical poetry; it is all those at once, slippery and sly yet hardhitt ing in a fantastic(al) blend. -YZ Chin

Poetry. "In Kyle McCord's new book Gabriel empathizes, the Devil sympathizes, and an exhausted God watches a televangelist. Moving, imaginative and full of surprising turns, McCord's poems are alive with both the world and the dead who 'have no word for intimate, and a thousand words for blind.' I love the abundance of these poems, their humor, the music that made my ears howl and purr. When I dream about McCord's poems dreaming of me, I ride an aging mechanical bull, werewolves take over the city, Abraham Lincoln begs to rip off my blouse, God's love vanishes into my body like bread. I wake up hungry, afraid, laughing."-Traci Brimhall "In Kyle McCord's mercurial and visionary new book, SYMPATHY FROM THE DEVIL, we see a bold refiguring of the moral imagination that, like a Dante without a Beatrice, wanders hell bereft of the traditional compass that would clarify the archetypes. Here the eye opens wide its compassion in the dark. Play transgresses and so, in opposition to the self-servitude of sublimity and rapture, sheds light on cruelties and exclusions suffered in the name of the ideal. Everywhere we look in this book, we find the generosity and precision of paradox. The pleasure of absurdity may distance heartbreak, but it likewise binds us to it, such that the poet's lightness of touch and ranginess of sensibility becomes indistinguishable from his vision, the sense that one half of sympathy is always the embrace, the other the letting go. A stunning collection."-Bruce Bond "'What do you want from any of us, reader?' asks the first poem in Kyle McCord's SYMPATHY FROM THE DEVIL, bristling a bit, cocking its chin, letting us know that what follows will never be exactly what we expect. The book brims with wily intelligence and unsettling humor that challenge and surprise and thrill and move us so that in the end what we want is everything this terrific book has to give."-Corey Marks 

This gripping drama follows Tom Duncan, the sole survivor of the largest cult mass suicide in U.S. history, as he works to rebuild his shattered life. After a Netflix documentary accuses Tom of masterminding the plot that led to the deaths of one hundred thirty-seven people, including his wife, he finds himself exiled from his home and family. Tom seeks redemption through a weekend memorial with other cult members who escaped before the grisly end. In Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult by Kyle McCord, we see how well-meaning people seeking spiritual community can become ensnared in webs of intrigue and deadly manipulation. Through the lens of a Netflix documentary as well as Tom's personal struggle, this book takes readers on a journey through the dark heart of a simple Iowa commune gone horribly wrong.

Informal Invitation to a Traveler is an epistolary exchange that exists uniquely apart from conventions of time and place. Alternately spare and lavish, a ghost narrative emerges of correspondences, echoes, and distances-raising questions of travel and renewal, home and seasons, abandonment and flight. With charm and intelligence, Hoag's and McCord's poems speak to each other, at each other, with and without each other. They are lively, keen, restless. They envision among the "rubbles of the cities" the possibility of a "home that lasts." -JAMES HAUG, author of Legends of the Recent Past Part baedeker, part intimate murmur, the poems in Informal Invitation to a Traveler suggest that identity itself is a kind of collaboration, a murky alchemy of thought, image, and language. At these poetic intersections, we find two voices bewitched by their own and one another's incongruities. What emerges is a dazzling study of perception: "How in one town we might be burning the monster, /and the next find ourselves listening to tides." -- KARA CANDITO, author of Taste of Cherry "The bridge of two voices across a landscape--one gorgeous, effusive, and intimate, the other stark and sorting. And the landscape? Flecked with small berries, nodes of sweetness, and hard weather, hard ground, and mazes of pretty but harming brambles. As you wake up here, poem by poem, Hoag and McCord invite you to consider what it means to let oneself wander and how much is enough. Evoking by turns whimsy, resolve, and dread, this is a terrific collaboration." -JOE HALL, Author of Pigafetta is My Wife

Kyle McCord's You Are Indeed an Elk, but This Is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze consists of thirty single-stanza wonders of the world-ferociously associative, disjunctively digressive, and melodiously surprising wherever they roam. Their acro-battery blasts of talky power are rich with joy and pathos, not to mention also an abiding, and sometimes biting, ambivalence toward both the meadow of contemporary American culture and "the unspeakable acts of kindness/ we committed together." This is a wonderfully tricked-out barrage of a book, the "wild life" in "wildlife," and especially for you.-Matt Hart, author of Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless I love the roaming and attentive eye through which we are invited to experience Kyle McCord's new book, You Are Indeed an Elk, but This Is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze . Here are poems at once mystic, intimate, hilarious, and completely enamored with the impossible world--"the smoothest crest / of skyline smirked by a river / without a single thing to lose / itself inside" is just one way this book amazingly imagines living and loving with others. I too, feel that some days "decorum may be all I have." Thank God this book reminds me that I'm wrong. -Wendy Xu, author of You Are Not Dead In this, Kyle McCord's fourth collection, someone is always doing something ill-advised. There's both trespassing (going where you shouldn't) and trespassing (doing what you shouldn't, or "sinning"-- a word that has its etymological roots in archery: sinning as "missing the mark." In other words, the "sinner" has tried to do right and failed). I've come to admire characters/ speakers/ real actual people who live bravely enough to sin in that kind of way. And McCord's speaker is heroic as he journeys, slaughters, and devotes himself to potentially dangerous love affairs. I find this book's title unusually helpful: "Sure, you're a an elk, but you're not supposed to be doing that otherwise acceptable elk-thing here " which, of course, my brain translates to "Sure, you're a human, and you're trying to be good at that by doing things you know humans do, but don't do it that way " So. What I'm saying is that this book is wondering how to live rightly. I wonder that all the time, so I'm glad someone as thoughtful and inventive as Kyle McCord is wondering with me. -Hannah Gamble, author of Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast