Devil, Dear

"Devil, Dear teems with erotic life. These poems adore the world within us and outside us, embracing our hungers and imperfections alike."—Joan Larkin

Mary Ann McFadden's existential poems capture bizarre, sweet, and humorous moments oft unobserved. The poet explores the evolution of romantic relationships from lust-driven days to the blander ones found in lasting companionship. Devil, Dear takes us traveling near and far, examining comfort zones and boldly stepping beyond them. We face the disquietude of mortality with McFadden in fearlessness and wit.

From "That Year the Whales":

All that spring the shadows made a changing shape
n the neighbor's clapboard walls: like rows of ocean waves

where blisters from the summer sun began to swell
with a cetacean grace, and let their bellies roll.
I watched out my window while the slow months' weight,
that year the whales rose out of the green paint,

pressed like coal in my throat, until the whole year lit up,
and dove, and shrank itself to a minute.

Mary Ann McFadden is a poet who has just returned to the United States after fifteen years living in Mazatlan and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She won the Four Way Books Intro Prize in 1995 and Eye of the Blackbird was published in 1997. Her poems have shown up in Green Mountains Review, Bloom, Psychology Tomorrow, the Marlboro Review, Southern Poetry Review, the American Voice, Moving Out, and elsewhere. McFadden taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and gave workshops at The New York City Libraries and at the Biblioteca in San Miguel. In 2010 she was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship. She currently lives in Riverside, California.