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"What I love about Jill McDonough's poems are the way that they capture the complexity and expansiveness of what it means to be human--how our time on this earth is beautiful and frustrating and often full of contradictions. Reading American Treasure feels like getting a beer with an old friend who is equal parts earnest and hilarious, someone who is full of empathy but who also calls it like they see it. American Treasure reminds me why McDonough is one of my favorite poets."
—Clint Smith
Buy American Treasure from Alice James
playlist for American Treasure
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"So the other day I was taking a break from nonfiction ALL. THE. TIME. to read Jill McDonough's new collection HERE ALL NIGHT, while also having lunch at Whole Foods, and I was laughing so hard with delight at the poems that two men decided I was now in a weakened enough state that they could pick me up. (What is it about women enjoying reading alone in restaurants that brings men out in droves? Seriously. This is the third time this has happened to me this summer. It's like reading turns you into a wounded springbok on the veldt or something.) But luckily, when one of the men leeringly asked if he could read the book along with me, I waved the book in his face and said, "SURE: IT'S POETRY!" and he backed away in horror. So let me strongly recommend HERE ALL NIGHT. If you want it to, it'll get you laid. If you don't want it to get you laid, it will successfully repel 99% of heterosexual male advances.* (*N.B.: Might have the opposite effect on lesbians.)"
—Paisley Rekdal
Here All Night in The Boston Globe: I'm the poet who swears
Buy Here All Night from Alice James
"These poems are wayyy calibrated for a kind of tensile language that doesn't sacrifice Jill McDonough's enviable ability to talk pragmatically into the heart of the matter inside poems, which is itself a feat. Reaper has all McDonough's best strengths—a perfect fusion of the early work's commitment to form and concept and project, plus the naughty yet sophisticated candor of Where You Live. . . it's a really good fucking book." —Kirsten Andersen
Reaper in The New York Times Book Review
Buy Reaper at Alice James Books
"Where You Live is a wonder cabinet of personal and public histories, a book of witness and inquiry, and a gift for those of us who think the poet's profession is to invent a new language for a singular vision. In this collection, the intersection of the domestic and the political is the human body. McDonough shows us the body as viewed from museum curiosity to workaday sack of blood and guts. From sinister anatomy book to sarcophagus. From stripper to prison physician to the fragments of Sappho. From the shadows of children scorched into the earth to an attempted sucide. From the mercenary to the cab driver. From hate crimes to sore feet. Like McDonough's Habeas Corpus, this book leaves us aching for more." —Michael McGriff
Buy Where You Live at Salt Books
"Jill McDonough’s understated, elegant writing in her first book, Habeas Corpus, brings to narrative and description such a clean dignity that a book about executions achieves something nigh unto impossible. Histories of hangings and burnings and injectings wind up not sensational but mysterious. They are quiet like natural history dioramas where we understand what a miracle life is by its having been taken."
—Kay Ryan
Buy Habeas Corpus at Salt Books
Jill’s new chapbook is out: Oh, James! is a series of poems based on the James Bond films, and it’s a delight. Copies are going faster than you can say Moneypenny, so get yours now by clicking here!
Oh, James! online at At Length
Jill's infrequent tweets Jill on facebook
email: jill(at)jillmcdonough.com
Jill's lesson plans for teaching BULLETS INTO BELLS and FELON in jail