Jami Macarty

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Jami Macarty is a poet who teaches and writes in the United States and in Canada. She teaches creative writing and contemporary poetry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and she is the founder of the online poetry journal The Maynard.

Macarty has published three chapbooks: Landscape of the Wait (Finishing Line Press, 2017), Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), and Instinctive Acts (Nomados Literary Publishers, 2018). Landscape of the Wait centers on the aftermath of a traumatic car accident, as the speaker's nephew lies in a coma for months and his family tries to make sense of the tragedy.[1] Instinctive Acts follows a poet-speaker as she wanders through the streets of Vancouver, collecting observations and language as she goes.[2]

Macarty's first full-length poetry collection, The Minuses, was published by The Center for Literary Publishing in 2020. The Minuses was a winner of the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards[3] and was listed in the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses roundup of notable 2020 poetry debuts.[4] The title poem from this collection won the 2016 Real Good Poem Prize (selected by Kiki Petrosino) and was published as a broadside from Rabbit Catastrophe Press.[5] The poem "Thin Attachment" from this collection also appeared in the June 24, 2021 edition of Poetry Daily. The poems in The Minuses combine ecological observation with mathematical terminology.[6] The Minuses has also been described as an ecofeminist text,[7] situating its speaker in the sky and in the landscape (particularly the landscape of the Sonoran Desert).[8] Writing in Interim magazine, reviewer Lucy Aul observes that "the book is in dialogue with a theological concept of detachment, wherein what is sought is a release from desire";[9] Bill Neumire notes in a review for Vallum that The Minuses "engages with [the] notion of minuses as subtraction, loss, missingness, but also the Buddhist idea of that which you gain by losing desire and distraction."[8] Macarty is a practitioner of yoga and meditation, and these practices inform her creative work.

References[edit]

  1. ^ Walker, Andrea (2018-06-25). "Review of Jami Macarty's Chapbook, "Landscape of The Wait"". panoply, a literary zine. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  2. ^ Spenst, Kevin. "Chuffed About Chapbooks: Soup Cans and All". SubTerrain. 8 (81): 64–65.
  3. ^ "Book Awards". New Mexico Book Co-op. Retrieved 2021-03-11.
  4. ^ "CLMP's Year-End Roundup: Poetry of 2020". Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. Retrieved 2021-03-11.
  5. ^ "Real Good Poem Prize". Rabbit Catastrophe Press. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  6. ^ Mason, Holly. "Review: The Minuses by Jami Macarty". entropymag.org. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  7. ^ Turner, Jess. ""She acknowledges the circle. / There is no obvious beginning": An Interview with Jami Macarty | Center for Literary Publishing". coloradoreview.colostate.edu. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  8. ^ a b Neumire, Bill (2020). "Review of THE MINUSES by Jami Macarty". Vallum. 17 (2): 66–69.
  9. ^ Aul, Lucy (2020). "What Is Missing Lives In What Is Found: On The Minuses by Jami Macarty, The Mountain West Poetry Series, 2019". Interim. 36 (5): 176.