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Tree-Lined Streets of Queens by James McKee

$22.99

Full-length, Paper

979-8-89990-191-1

2025

The poems of James McKee‘s second collection, Tree-Lined Streets of Queens, remain deeply rooted in the NYC of the early 2020s even as they venture beyond the place and time of their making. Those tumultuous years, when days felt like weeks and weeks like months, haunt his poetry like the ocean’s jagged rhythms, sometimes unheard, sometimes deafening. Across his book’s four sections, the poems address the collective urgencies of history, race and ecologic decline, as well as the personal ones of family and memory. If anything in these pages prompts the reader to say, Yes, that’s how it is, his dearest poetic ambitions will have been fulfilled.

James McKee enjoys failing to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the otherwise uneventful spring of 2020, while his poems and essays appear sporadically, if widely. He spends his free time traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.

PRAISE:

 

“Truly fine poems….I love your work.”

–X. J. Kennedy, author of “In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007“

 

“Intelligent…handled with pleasure and confidence… beautifully executed….This fine poetry, lush with detail and rich with sound, can savor its thematic cake and still have it later. ”
–Ron Smith, Poet Laureate of Virginia, author of Its Ghostly Workshop

 

“Brilliant, unforgettable…a surprise on every page…These are poems I wish I’d written.”
–Christophe Cayle, author of Just Another Professional Irishman

 

 

 

 

 

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