American Wake

Kerrin McCadden

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781574232486
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

New from a poet whose astonishing images, emotional honesty, and storytelling power holds a singular clarity of vision. An American wake is what the Irish call a farewell to those emigrating to the United States. A New England writer equally at home in Ireland, Kerrin McCadden explores family, death and grief, apologies, and all manner of departures in this collection. As she writes in the title poem: When we are out to sea, we look back to see faces
ringing the shore like a fence, those we love in up
to their hips in waves, waving goodbye like mad. Among the 50 poems included are My Broken Family, Weeks After My Brother Overdoses, One Way to Apologize to a Daughter for Careless Words, Portrait of the Family as a Definition, and My Mother Talks to Her Son about Her Heart. This collection by a writer of extraordinary gifts will appeal to any reader with a belief in the magic of words to unveil our world and our deepest feelings to ourselves.

How the Heart Works

I keep thinking about the way the heart works,

but I think about it wrong, on purpose, the way

I do other things on purpose that I shouldn’t,

like one-click shop for books that wait for me

like dogs in cardboard coats until I come home

for them and let them in. No, I keep thinking

about the heart, the one my mother has.

There are all kinds of words for it, words

her doctor says, words she repeats to me

about what’s wrong with it. I see her, on the phone

tied to the wall by a coiled cord, the doctor

blue-toothed on the other end, telling

her what is happening inside her rib cage,

the one I keep seeing like an ornate birdcage

someone has planted a tiny-leafed ivy

inside, hanging in the corner, or at the edge

of the fireplace, on a tiny table, long spindly legs

and a top as small as a book, not as the housing

it is for the heart that does all kinds of things wrong,

things I can’t know, no matter how many times

the aorta of it is repeated, no matter which

carotid phone call ends in semi-lunar

valves, there are always left and right atria,

greenhouses of the heart, the tricuspid valve-way

opening onto the patio my father has turned

over, stone by stone, so it looks new,

and pulmonary arteries growing like

hydrangea, there, outside the glass ventricle.

My Brother Wailing

There is a river outside my window, which is more

than I ever asked for. Sure, a river is a bigger monster

than I am used to, but, most of the time, it is no worse

than my brother. The river stones get worn fine,

like my parents did. All of this is more than I asked for.

Even the armchair by the window. I didn’t ask for that

any more than I asked for the word soon to mean

what it does. Soon is everything, almost. My brother

was almost a mountain. Not in the way that mountains

are majestic, but in the way that mountains are also monsters.

He blocked the sun often enough, even from himself.

What is a boy to do in the armchair—with the tourniquet

gone slack, his veins filled with the drug I always thought

must feel like sugar tastes—but let the light fade?

This is also what mountains do, they let the light fade early

in the houses to the east of them. I remember my father

pinning him to the stairs, himself a mountain, and my brother

wailing, like he did not understand. My father was a mountain

in the way that mountains are mountains, tall, majestic, proud.

My father was a mountain in the way that mountains greet

the morning, like a basket to hold the sun. Good morning,

good morning, the houses to the east filling with light.

The people sit on their porches and watch. What the boy does

on the other side of the mountain is he becomes a river,

and soon, and he does what rivers do, he becomes a monster.

He etches and etches shadows into everything. I rescue his dog,

...

Table of contents

• Praise for American Wake
• Also by Kerrin McCadden
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Epistle: Leaving
• American Wake
• How the Heart Works
• Killeter Forest: Father McLaughlin’s Well
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author