About the Book
For all of us who knew Kevin McIlvoy as a peerless fiction writer and miraculous teacher, here is the posthumous gift of his first poetry collection, Singing Lessons. Mc was a musician who found his truest instrument in words. Meditating on love, addiction, family, distance, the poems trace the dances we make, the songs we sing . . . the grit of the blues, twang of steel guitar, howl of harmonica-our haunted history as a nation. Yet the wild beguiling music of this work is all Mc's own: a dazzling dance in which "together we sweeten." -Sheila Fiona Black
About the Author :
Kevin "Mc" McIlvoy (1953-2022) published six novels-most recently One Kind Favor; a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico; and two collections of prose poems and short fictions, culminating in Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels. Singing Lessons is a posthumous collection of Mc's poems and prose poems, many of them first published in journals such as Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, Kenyon Review Online, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Prime Number Magazine, and Willow Springs.
Review :
These deceptively conversational pieces are poems at ease and at attention both. In them, we find healing everywhere along with the damage and danger to heal from. The poems glide forward on an abiding undercurrent of constant humanness, and are, finally, small equations of love. "What's the deal that he thinks his saved life is a big deal?" Big is regularized here, as we are brought down from the heights to the baseline feelings that hold them up. Further, "...for twelve seconds we were the same / man, the very same," these poems connect us to each other, over and over, in a recurring, redemptive spirit. Finally, we are asked to "Find where the sparks come from. / Find what the fire will become." These poems, in their rage, their sadness, and their joy, speak to our common fire.
-Alberto Rios, Poet Laureate of Arizona and author of Not Go Away Is My Name
For all of us who knew Kevin McIlvoy as a peerless fiction writer and miraculous teacher, here is the posthumous gift of his first poetry collection, Singing Lessons. Mc was a musician who found his truest instrument in words. Meditating on love, addiction, family, distance, the poems trace the dances we make, the songs we sing as we are shaped by what Keats called "this vale of soul-making." In scope and sheer vitality, we hear echoes of Berryman's Dream Songs; the visionary exactitude of poets like Lynda Hull, Larry Levis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly; also, the grit of the blues, twang of steel guitar, howl of harmonica-our haunted history as a nation. Yet the wild beguiling music of this work is all Mc's own: a dazzling dance in which "together we sweeten."
-Sheila Fiona Black, author of Radium Dream and co-editor of Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability
Singing Lessons is luminous and gritty, meditative and cacophonous, darkly funny and celebratory. It is both dance and musical composition-parts classical, blues, and avant garde-a waltz at its center reminding us of what language can never completely express: "what was, what is-if words / were what a dancer does," its final notes heartbreakingly prescient.
-Polly Buckingham author of The River People
Kevin McIlvoy's superb Singing Lessons tells stories with a Frost-like respect for the terror, longing, and absurdity of everyday intersections with archetypal forces, and the difficult necessity of saying anything about what happened afterward. The stakes here are so high that it's a surprise when the poems are also, often, shockingly funny: in one almost-epic, McIlvoy does for couples' dance instruction what Homer did for war, only funnier and sexier. When I fed this book into one of those online analyzers that shows which words are used most often, it seemed telling that one is "us." Also, "one," "time," "sing" and "inside"-once upon a time, a man sang about what is on the inside. Shakespeare believed that with his poems he could make people speak his beloved's name "[w]hen all the breathers of this world are dead," and he was right. The Kevin McIlvoy we loved is gone, but such virtue had his pen that he still lives, "Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men."
-Patrick Donnelly, author of Willow Hammer, Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge
