The Stargazers

Truly fine poems....I love your work. X. J. Kennedy author of In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems 1955-2007 Intelligent...handled with pleasure and confidence... beautifully executed....This fine poetry lush with detail and rich with sound can savor its thematic cake and still have it later as far as Im concerned. Dont we too prefer the impeccably impure in art over righteous dogmatism? Ron Smith Poet Laureate of Virginia author of Its Ghostly Workshop Gorgeous splendid even magical...This is the book I wish Id written. Christophe Cayle author of Forget You Poems are emotionally fraught objects some of us like to have around because like all art they offer the most satisfying reconciliations between ourselves and the world. The poetry of James McKees debut collection The Stargazers invites readers to engage with personal intensities of love grief and times passage as well as with the looming forces of climate change entrenched oppression and weaponized history. And so amid the numbing cacophonous welter of 21st Century American life McKees poems undertake serial acts of rescue and refusal of commemoration and condemnation of compelled lyric outburst and deliberative public engagement. If art as Picasso said is a lie that shows us the truth these poems neither hide their status as objects of artifice nor despair of offering their readers the mysterious pleasure of the clarifying word.