What Ties Us by Whitney Mackman

“The tensile strength in these astonishingly moving poems of self-witness comes from Mackman’s vision of mutability in all things human, most of all love. But what binds and ties her reckonings is an uncanny ability to find humor and self-knowledge in any and all occasions.”

—Peter Cooley, Poet Laureate Louisiana, 2015-2017

“The sun put a gun / to his own head, / then fell splat / on my porch.” Bold and inventive, Whitney Mackman‘s debut, What Ties Us, presents the poet as witness to a private and public world in a state of emergency. While Mackman radically critiques her subjects, allusions to literary predecessors, world mythology, and Jewish mysticism will delight readers of poetry. Yet the authenticity of these poems will grip readers of all bents — here, the words of high school English teachers serve as epigraphs, and the persona of Judith of the deuterocanonical book engages a demotic idiom to relay the story of one woman’s individuality and power. What Ties Us does the gutsy work of reclamation.

–Carolyn Hembree, author of Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague

In Whitney Mackman’s universe of being, the mountains mumble, the rivers tumble, the seasons savour ‘the ripeness of earth’, even as the poet rolls down ‘the pyramid of apples’. This poet knows why the parrotfish change their gender, the eels their sex. There is also that father who changes the way he thinks, ‘but not the way he votes’, and that old love whose shadows keep falling across the threshold of an apparently susceptible memory.. . . .

Rooted, soulful, and wondrously wise, these are poems which touch us with their feathers of fancy, making sure we think as we sing along. Mackman strikes me as a poet with tremendous promise.

–Niyi Osundare, author of If Only the Road Could Talk; Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans