Books by Maureen N. McLane

Maureen N. McLane was raised in upstate New York before gaining degrees from Harvard University, the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Chicago. Her books of poetry are Same Life (2008), World Enough (2010), This Blue (2014), Mz N: the serial (2016) and Some Say (2017). My Poets, a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. McLane is Professor of English at New York University.

From the alphabet inscribed in our DNA to the stars that once told stories, Same Life maps a cosmos both intricate and vast. In her first full-length book of poems, Maureen N. McLane has written a beautifully sensual and moving work, full of passion and sadness and humor and understanding. Erotically charged lyrics conjure a latter-day Sappho; major sequences explore citizenship and sexuality, landscape and history, moving us from Etruscan ruins to video porn, ushering us through cities, gardens, lakefronts, and airplanes. Here are poems equally alert to shifts in weather and cracks in consciousness; here is a poet equally at home with delicate song and vivid polemic. Same Life evokes an American life in transit, shareable yet singular; singable, ponderable, erotic; an unpredictable venture in twenty-first-century soul-making.