"That Nothing"
from Wesley McNair's
The Ghosts of You and Me

Wesley McNair:

Wesley McNair's volumes of poetry include six collections and two limited editions. He has also published books of essays and three anthologies of Maine writing. A recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, he has received two NEA grants, and has twice been awarded Rockefeller fellowships for creative work at the Bellagio Center on Lake Como in Italy. His honors in poetry include the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize, the Jane Kenyon Award, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal. He lives with his wife Diane in Mercer, Maine. Visit Wesley McNair's web site....

About The Ghosts of You and Me:

In this new collection, Wesley McNair offers his fullest vision of human life, both its hardships and its rich possibilities. Opening with poems about growing up with family conflict in a New England of broken farms and towns, McNair explores the limits of personal wishes and American dreams. Here too are haunting encounters with ghost selves, the dead, and the gangsters in old movies, lighter fare such as a poem about the poignant hopefulness of comb-overs, and a transcendent series of lyrics that celebrate self-acceptance and the spiritual dimension of "life on the ground." Praised by Maxine Kumin as "a master craftsman" and by Philip Levine as a poet with "a profound love and understanding of people and a superb ear," Wesley McNair here gives us his strongest and most moving volume to date, a major addition to what the Ruminator Review calls "one of the most individual bodies of work by a poet of his generation."

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