Mz N

The acclaimed poet memoirist and essayist Maureen N. McLane here charts a new path into vital genre-bending territories. Not a novel not a memoir not a lyric Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes offers something else—“life . . . a continual allegory” (to invoke Keats): a life intense episodic female sexual philosophical romantic analytic. Tracking the growth of one poet’s mind switchbacking its way through American English Mz N toggles between story and song. This is a poetry both “furious / & alive.”. Alive to the lash of love the longueurs of adolescence the limits of identity Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes is a bravura experiment in life-writing—an assaying a testing a transforming an honoring of the tentative and the torqued. What is it to be contemporary to be “one / among other ones” in a “cracking world”? How does a body vibrate into being? How is a mind made out of other minds? Seizing the queer realities of any life Mz N explores how one is surprised seduced and struck into speech thought song silence. “Then what is life?” cried Shelley. So too Mz N.