Books by M F McAuliffe

Portland-based writer M. F. McAuliffe was shocked by the death of Ursula K. Le Guin more than she could have imagined because she’d never imagined it at all. These twenty five unconventional elegies, written over the course of the following twelve months, are the aftershock.

Set in a majority minority high school just south of Los Angeles in the midst of the Cold War, these vivid stories of students, teachers and support staff catch the 1980s in the act of giving birth to the present.

When M. Miller, librarian @ a Seatac stock photo agency, falls asleep @ a cinema 1 rainy night, the dead invade her dreams, a mystery man talks about her past, & her job takes on strange, suspicious dimensions. With help of K. Cobain, F. Villon, & Leather Boys, she slips past the Space Needle to face love, death, resurrection, & globalization.

"Only my contradictions hold me upright," claims one of the poems in this ferociously lucid and often funny new volume by M.F. McAuliffe. On the one hand it batters us with Lear-like bleak assertions ("Time and heaven and earth are stones. / They grind us between them") - assertions it goes on to illustrate, most impressively, in the final series of poems retelling the Orpheus myth. On the other hand, the very rhythm, almost reassuring, of other aphoristic conclusions suggests an admiration despite everything for the world it so passionately curses and condemns ("to walk through the city and know it for rubble- / This is a dream as old as the soul"). - Luisa Valenzuela, author of Clara, Strange Things Happen Here, The Lizard's Tail, Black Novel (with Argentines), and DeathcatsThis book takes the reader to ancient Rome, straight from the mouth of Catullus to the person sitting right beside us. McAuliffe makes these poems relevant to everyday life in the present, yet channels ancient memories; reminding us that some things are eternal and can never leave our consciousness. -Amy Temple Harper, author of Cramped Uptown