Uttermost Paradise Place

Laura McKee

APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner

Winner of the 2009 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Laura McKee’s debut collection, Uttermost Paradise Place, allows us to unhook ourselves from the confines of the present moment and drape language around the simultaneities of our inner life—that in our experience of any present we are living as much in the past or future.

ISBN: 9780977639571

Format: Paperback

Care and Feeding of the Faux Fur Coat

Take your coat out to a snow-covered field for a scream.
Make shapes of its animal with your breath in the frozen air.
Stand in a silent stand of pines. Bury your hands
in its pockets and imagine it as it once was. Wail, wail,
wail until you become half of its grief. Take it to the groomer, the pound,
your psychologist. Tell them it’s keeping you up at night.
Work regularly with your coat on language skills.
Pin notes to its sleeves: I love you so much.
This is all a lie. It’s not you; it’s me.

About the Author

Laura McKee received a BA from the University of Utah and an MFA from the University of Washington. Her first collection, Uttermost Paradise Place, was selected by Claudia Keelan for the 2009 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. See You Soon was published through the University of Arkansas Press as a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize. Her work has appeared most recently in Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, and Cerise Press. In 2018, her manuscript, Love Letter(s), received the Robert Creeley Memorial …

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Reviews

“… The poems in Uttermost Paradise Place achieve transparency. While many of them are perceived via a persona, it is ultimately the personae of perception itself that proscribes the pure pleasure of reading. ‘Suit, I salute you. You have changed my questions.’ How sweetly rare it is to overhear a poet’s homage to her poem! Who authors who? As if we could answer!” —Claudia Keelan