Maureen N. McLane

Maureen N. McLane Poems

Maureen N. McLane Biography

Maureen N. McLane grew up in upstate New York and was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. She is the author of World Enough (2010), and Same Life: poems (2008); and This Blue (2014); as well as the poetry chapbook, This Carrying Life (2006). She has also published two books of literary criticism, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (2008) and Romanticism and the Human Sciences (2000), and coedited The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (2008). Her book, My Poets (2012)—an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism—was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. World Enough was named one of 2010’s Five Best Poetry Books by Library Journal and one of the year’s 10 Best Books of Poems by Paul Muldoon in The New Yorker. Same Life—finalist for both The Lambda Literary Award and The Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award—was also named one of the year’s best books by the Chicago Tribune. This Blue is a finalist for the National Book Award. A contributing editor at Boston Review and poetry editor at Grey, she has published widely on poetry, contemporary fiction, and sexuality in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Boston Review, the Washington Post, American Poet, and elsewhere. In 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. Currently an associate professor of English at NYU, she has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, MIT, and the East Harlem Poetry Project.)

The Best Poem Of Maureen N. McLane

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and sex once
a day a week a
month a year
goes by and one
hyacinth only
returns, frail
blue against the militant
grass that does cover all
in the residential
precinct of the
New England town
its roads long paved
old Indian trails the steps
they took toward
us the first
exchange for a fish
two biscuits

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