Thing Music

"The poems of Anthony McCann are beautiful, brutal, and unerring. They present us with, or return us to, a complicated, violent, poignant, weird, and mysterious world—a world which is very particularly his, and also our own, re-sung. For some time now I have believed McCann to be one of the finest poets writing today."—Maggie Nelson

"McCann demonstrates that the truth surrounds us all; our best way of connecting with it is through compassion and love. With equal parts exuberance and dread, the speaker encourages us to 'waste the whole day feeling these things.'"— Boston Review

Thing Music is full of flesh, of creatures tangled in their worlds. Marked variously by the desert and coastal landscapes of Southern California and the intersections of phenomenology and anarchism, these poems are porous bodies, traversed by light and noise.

From "Mouth Guitar":

Now the pulsing afternoon
takes each belly in its hands
lifts it up towards some glass
and all that's inside

While he crawled on
with his body
towards vengeance
• r the state

Anthony McCann lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the University of California-Riverside's Palm Desert MFA program. He is the "Poet Laureate" of Machine Project, and also teaches courses at the California Institute of the Arts.