Attached to Earth by Maureen McGranaghan

These graceful, perceptive poems of Maureen McGranaghan are searching meditations of family and faith—with a dash of wit. In her slant vision, sinners, saints, and even their dogs leap again and again, “unattached to the earth,” and the ordinary is tested and transformed.

–Peter Oresick

Maureen McGranaghan’s Attached to Earth will detach you from earth, leave you briefly hovering above it, watching small moments crystallize into discovery and renewal, loss, and sustenance. McGranaghan is a keen observer, finding the subtle nuance in everyday encounters, finding the humanity in Jesus, and yes, even in poets.

–Jim Daniels

The poems in Maureen McGranaghan’s Attached to Earth navigate the kingdom of this world, map out the terrain between the ordinary—the everyday—and the sacred. “Even the dog knows/she is the Queen of Heaven,” the speaker says of Mary in one poem, and in another, Peter sits down with Christ at a coffee shop. McGranaghan is part mystic, part metaphysical, and quick to bring us back (and with humor) to the material world, to the earth, and to what Keats called, “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.” “Who/ skirted death tonight (was it me?),” McGranaghan writes. These poems wrestle with elemental human questions, not to answer them or offer shallow prescriptions, but to dwell in the contradictions, in mystery.

–Anna Catone