Molly McGinnis is a writer based in Washington, D.C. She has a degree in literature from American University and currently works and studies in the Department of Epidemiology at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. Her poetry has been incorporated into curricula for high school students via both CommonLit and Pearson, and she has written for a number of publications in both creative and research capacities, including Guernica, CQ Researcher, The American Institute of Physics, the Journal of Clinical Oncology: Oncology Practice, The Washington Independent Review of Books, and The Environmental Media Association. From March 2020 through May 2023, she served in a variety of leadership roles with the COVID-19 crisis response organization Medical Supply Drive (MSD), including as a regional co-coordinator for Washington, D.C. and a National Logistics Director for the United States. MSD’s work was covered by CNN, Fox, and NBC New York, among other outlets. She is a member of the Health Professionals in Training program with the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) and has volunteered with the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for over ten years. Recurring Dream with Bright Orange Everything is her first book.
PRAISE:
In Molly McGinnis’ new collection, her first, the literary convention of the dream vision—in a long lineage including William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, and the twentieth century dream-master, Max Jacob—arranges the ordinary into surreal shapes that startle and disturb the reader from the American delirium. We are really here, in the middle of the great nothing, blithely crossing the street, or suddenly time traveling to a forgotten evening twenty years before our births. What is brilliant about McGinnis’ work is the way she writes in a voice of utmost clarity to speak of mysterious things, where other dream poets try too hard to estrange, ending up vague and pedestrian. But this clear-mystery, this sense that all of the world outside is actually being projected from the inside (as dreams teach us), is handled in a way that feels new, delightfully reorganized into an erotic joining with the universe. It’s tantric, it’s ecstatic, this discovering the cosmos within our own flesh and blood: “Above us, evening drains to marks across the rooftops,” she writes. “Eyes of Hydra watching Cancer, Mars’s hemoglobin light.” Few old salts could paint real life as well as this author does, even now at the start of her career.
–David Keplinger, author of IceÂ
Recurring Dream with Bright Orange Everything is partly a naturalist’s catalogue of the sumptuous, distressing earth and the human creatures who blur their way across it, partly a researcher’s tough-minded inquiry into what is knowable in human history and in the various sciences that history has engendered. In McGinnis’s hands, we see why those “fields” of study are also called “disciplines”: it takes an iron determination to pick the lock of time’s mysteries, though under such touch “the century shivers/ and bursts.” Taking us across thousands of miles of dreamscape and literal landscape, Recurring Dream oneirically links up American imperialism, transgression and incarceration, satellite imagery and opulent jewelry. “Proof is an object we catch with our senses,” McGinnis writes, though mystery is still there, warmly “curled among facts.” A feast for the intelligence.
–Laura Kolbe, author of The Decadent MovementÂ
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