Tracey McTague

"Like the sky just before a storm—bruisy and electric, angry and beautiful—Tracey McTague’s poems awe. The poems present a diorama world with a secret mythology—animals are never just animals; goddesses are real, are women—the kind who are angry and tired; not menstruating but on the rag. Time slips and stutters; language soars and dips, doubling back on itself. It’s a song or it’s a hymn or it’s a curse, whatever, it’s too late—here you are. Something’s always about to happen in Marginal Utility. When you squint one eye and peer through the aperture, you won’t see the same thing every time. This book, diorama of treasures, is a shifting landscape of wonder and weirdness that always changes, richer and more exciting each time you look." -Lauren Ireland

"Tracey McTague treats words as marvels of nature and concentrates them. She writes most lines as independent units in a collage poetics, yet the self-aware passions of her unconscious conjure a pagan abandon. She sees beyond the senses and beyond sentences. A pent-up-ness sweeps away grammar. Many of her lines read like 13-stroke Chinese characters in translation. Her clipped lyricism suits a scale that is galaxy big, including cigarettes and a thong. Primal, not primitive. Marginal Utility is a safe ride with a dangerous driver, and you’ll be left excited." -John Godfrey

"Tracey McTague’s poetry is sensual, visceral, vibrant, playful, arresting, stark, sometimes shocking or haunting, and always uplifting. I love this book!" -John S. Hall

"This playful, satiric collection explicitly samples its sources in folklore, myth, and history, even as its subjects are the quotidian world of war, environmental collapse, sex, and children." -Marthe ReedPoetryFoundation.org

Read Tracey's interview with John Mulrooney of Boog City, February 18, 2022