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Jami Macarty
she/her
Poet
Jami Macarty gratefully recognizes Native Nations of the West—especially the Coast Salish and O’odham—as the traditional and rightful owners of lands where she has the great privilege to live and learn—as a teacher at Simon Fraser University, as an independent editor, and as a writer of essays, reviews, and poetry.
Jami is the author of The Long Now That Conditions Permit, selected as the winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize by poets Sherwin Bitsui, Claudia Keelan, Donald Revell, Sasha Steenson, and Ronaldo Wilson, to be published by the University of Nevada Press.
Jami’s first full-length poetry collection, The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), won the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona.
About Their Work:
Jami McCarty’s epigrammatic, spaciously minimalistic poetry gives the audience room to notice many things: prismatic and mundane creatures, the contamination that surrounds them and
sometimes makes them shimmer, the comings and goings of human love, and the ruination of humans on barren streets of cities and dry expanses. No one can out-reverence McCarty when it comes to addressing a lover or a world, and very few can capture the way McCarty does the glinting, sometimes superficially beautiful spectacle that “vagues” the toll we take on the world and each other. Creosote and turpentine, meth and carbon, cancer and syrinx take their place before and after hawks, hummingbirds and tanagers; McCarty’s shamanic ear gives each its weight and position to graph the circumference of hope and regret. This poetry is elegiac, enraptured, funny, tersely incisive in turn; it’s expertly wrought and, against considerable odds, never despondent.
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Website(s):
Books (for purchase):
The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020)
Online Work:
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