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Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies by Kathleen McClung

Name: Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies by Kathleen McClung
SKU: 140340
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Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

It’s the women who are speaking here, who are dreaming and taking action. Kathleen McClung transports us not only to the Aladdin Theater on East Colfax—she delivers us inside the lives of real women. Who doesn’t want to return to the power of Angelica Huston in “The Grifters”? With playful yet precise craft, McClung makes her own movies—these love letters to intrepid women in this delightful, time-traveling collection.

–Jan Beatty, Dragstripping, University of Pittsburgh Press

This book is a joyous romp through a collection of classic films with strong women leads, nimbly rendered in poetic forms including triolets, villanelles, pantoums, sestinas, sonnets, and more. The poems will pull you in and make you glad you stayed, with strong film-noirish opening lines like “Kate Croy, your mother’s dead. Your father drinks” that always wind up in a place of larger human pathos and wisdom (e.g., “Forgiveness, your own form of eloquence”). Kudos to this author’s ambition and command of form that give us a book of poetry that is thought-provoking and wise, but also very fun to read.

–Rebecca Foust, Marin Poet Laureate Emerita and author of You are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems.

Making the best of a horrific event—the COVID-19 pandemic—Kathleen McClung’s latest collection of poems was written during that fraught time to remind and comfort readers in one of the best ways: at the movies starring the women who made them memorable. McClung’s choice to dress these heroines in found forms—triolets, abecedarians, double sonnets, among them—ensures that each is ready for her close up. Grab your popcorn—you’ll want to read the stunning ways Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies takes its final bow.

–Lynne Thompson, Los Angeles Poet Laureate Emerita and author of Blue on a Blue Palette

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Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies

by Kathleen McClung

Paper

$15.99 List: ~~$17.99~~

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This title will be released on August 22, 2025

Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies celebrates a wide range of inspiring women characters—the resilience, resourcefulness and courage of Thelma and Louise, Dorothy and Auntie Em, and others young and old who battle and triumph over monsters, bad guys, and everyday conflicts. With curiosity, compassion and craft, Kathleen McClung explores women’s strengths and vulnerabilities in comedies and tragedies, blockbusters and contemplative indie films. The sonnets, sestinas and other poetic forms in the collection embrace Frances McDormand’s Minnesota police chief, Grace Kelly’s Manhattan socialite, Kate Winslet’s Titanic survivor as well as women providing care and love in quietly heroic ways. #poetry #women #movies #resilience

Kathleen McClung is the author of five poetry collections: Questions of Buoyancy, A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, winner of the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize, Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly and Almost the Rowboat. She co-authored with Mary Kennedy Eastham and Eileen Malone Three Soul-Makers: Poems That Bring Us Together. Winner of the Morton Marr, Maria W. Faust, and Rita Dove national poetry prizes, her work appears in a variety of journals and anthologies. A 2024 finalist for San Francisco Poet Laureate, she served from 2021-23 as guest editor for The MacGuffin, a print literary journal based in Michigan. She also served as associate director of the Soul-Making Keats literary competition and judged the contest’s sonnet category. In 2018-2019 she was a writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Kathleen teaches literature and writing classes at Skyline College in San Bruno and directed the Women on Writing conference there for ten years. She also teaches privately and at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) in San Francisco. Visit her website at www.kathleenmcclung.com