Fierce, compassionate, unflinching, beautifully crafted, and completely accessible, the fifty poems in Mary Mackey’s new collection Breaking the Fever combine intense lyricism with sharp insights. Mackey puts no limits on her subjects: everything from the mystical visions of a sick child to global warming interests her. Sometimes the poems are comic (as when a disillusioned Leda dishes the dirt on the great white swan who claimed to be Zeus); sometimes they are tragic (a massacre in Mexico that Mackey witnessed, longing for a second chance to speak to dead relatives, grief for young men who fall in battle). Whatever the topic, readers will find themselves entranced by the sheer lyricism of Mackey’s style and her lushly crafted imagery, both reminiscent of the great poets of Latin America (whom Mackey cites as major influences). Here are moving love poems made more powerful by the fact that Mackey has written them to her husband of twenty years, a sensual samba that sets galaxies dancing, a vision of a world in which racial prejudice no longer exists because everyone has miraculously turned blue. In short, Mackey has an imagination that defies categorization. Belonging to no particular school of poetry, she offers us lyric moments in a unique style that deftly combines passion and intelligence.
Related through her father's family to Mark Twain, Mary Mackey graduated from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. During her twenties, she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. Her published works include thirteen novels and six collections of poetry.
For a number of years, she has been traveling to Brazil and incorporating her experiences into her fiction and poetry. Four of her novels (The Widow's War, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring) incorporate some of the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble. In 2005 she took a boat up a tributary of the Amazon, traveling over two thousand miles through flooded jungle. In June 2009, she made another trip to one of the headwaters of the Amazon on the Rio Tocantins
Her works have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List and been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. A screenwriter as well as a novelist and poet, she has sold feature-length screenplays to Warner Brothers as well as to independent film companies. John Korty directed the filming of her original award-winning screenplay Silence. The film rights to her comic novel The Stand-In were recently optioned by director Renee De Palma of OneMotion Pictures. Three times, Garrison Keillor has read her poetry on The Writer's Almanac.
At present, she lives in northern California with her husband Angus Wright, and is Professor Emeritus of English at California State University. To learn more about her you are invited to visit her webpage at: http://www.marymackey.com You can also find her on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/marymackeywriter?sk=info
For more biographical information about Mary Mackey, also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mackey
