Kyle McCord

This gripping drama follows Tom Duncan, the sole survivor of the largest cult mass suicide in U.S. history, as he works to rebuild his shattered life. After a Netflix documentary accuses Tom of masterminding the plot that led to the deaths of one hundred thirty-seven people, including his wife, he finds himself exiled from his home and family. Tom seeks redemption through a weekend memorial with other cult members who escaped before the grisly end.
 
In Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult by Kyle McCord, we see how well-meaning people seeking spiritual community can become ensnared in webs of intrigue and deadly manipulation. Through the lens of a Netflix documentary as well as Tom’s personal struggle, this book takes readers on a journey through the dark heart of a simple Iowa commune gone horribly wrong.

I have been keeping some huge news under my hat: my sixth book, X-Rays and Other Landscapes is forthcoming in winter of this year with Trio House Press! I am incredibly excited to be working with Tayve Neese, Matt Mauch, and the rest of the Trio House Crew. Plus, Nick Courtright is guest designing the cover. Color me elated!

You can check out the announcement here: http://www.triohousepress.org/

My new book, Magpies in the Valley of Oleanders, will be released at AWP this year!  Hurrah!  The book was the winner of the Trio House open period.  I’ll be signing books at the Trio House table from 11-3 on Thursday and 12-2 on Friday.  Come see me and pick up a book. More updates on my schedule to follow.

“I am stunned by Kyle McCord’s Magpies in the Valley of Oleanders. In its catalogue of terror and beauty, we find inroads to our own sense of self and devotion and how we fit into the world. This is not just a book of poetry, but an essential entry in the world’s encyclopedia of irredeemable sorrow and profound, revelatory truth.”

—Nick Courtright, Author of Let There Be Light

Kyle McCord’s Magpies in the Valley of Oleanders sets the wild clamor of the sublime to the musical measure of the lyric, that “muscular alchemy.” Images chime, fractal-like, across scale, allowing something as small as a knee to contain a “galaxy / of fragile nerves” and something as momentous as our world to become “a tiny orb.” These leaps and inversions of scope dizzy the reader into the fantastic drunkenness of seeing the world anew, its offerings and its consequences. “I know material life / is the illusion,” he writes, and, like the speaker who says, “when I dove into the water, / I was not me anymore,” the reader who dives into McCord’s poems is transformed.

—Emilia Phillips, Author of Signaletics

In these wide-ranging and beautiful poems, Kyle McCord considers the intersections of art, politics and lived experience, his perceptions of one always broadening and deepening the others. Poems beginning in works of visual arts are far too restless to remain there, casting always outwards into often harrowing narratives of family, history, visual beauty, and the certainty of mortality. Kyle McCord’s poems are not just engaging. They are distinguished by an imagination that is at once startling and deeply humane.

—Kevin Prufer, Author of Churches

Kyle McCord’s You Are Indeed an Elk, but This Is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze consists of thirty single-stanza wonders of the world—ferociously associative, disjunctively digressive, and melodiously surprising wherever they roam. Their acro-battery blasts of talky power are rich with joy and pathos, not to mention also an abiding, and sometimes biting, ambivalence toward both the meadow of contemporary American culture and “the unspeakable acts of kindness/ we committed together.” This is a wonderfully tricked-out barrage of a book, the “wild life” in “wildlife,” and especially for you.—Matt Hart, author of Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless

I love the roaming and attentive eye through which we are invited to experience Kyle McCord’s new book, You Are Indeed an Elk, but This Is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze . Here are poems at once mystic, intimate, hilarious, and completely enamored with the impossible world–“the smoothest crest / of skyline smirked by a river / without a single thing to lose / itself inside” is just one way this book amazingly imagines living and loving with others. I too, feel that some days “decorum may be all I have.” Thank God this book reminds me that I’m wrong. –Wendy Xu, author of You Are Not Dead

In this, Kyle McCord’s fourth collection, someone is always doing something ill-advised. There’s both trespassing (going where you shouldn’t) and trespassing (doing what you shouldn’t, or “sinning”– a word that has its etymological roots in archery: sinning as “missing the mark.” In other words, the “sinner” has tried to do right and failed). I’ve come to admire characters/ speakers/ real actual people who live bravely enough to sin in that kind of way. And McCord’s speaker is heroic as he journeys, slaughters, and devotes himself to potentially dangerous love affairs. I find this book’s title unusually helpful: “Sure, you’re a an elk, but you’re not supposed to be doing that otherwise acceptable elk-thing here!” which, of course, my brain translates to “Sure, you’re a human, and you’re trying to be good at that by doing things you know humans do, but don’t do it that way!” So. What I’m saying is that this book is wondering how to live rightly. I wonder that all the time, so I’m glad someone as thoughtful and inventive as Kyle McCord is wondering with me. –Hannah Gamble, author of Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast

In a few days, I’ll be in Seattle.  You can find me at the iO: A Journal of New American Poetry table at H8.

I’m also excited to be reading at:

Thrush Poetry Review and Barn Owl Review–Wed. February 26th 7pm at Rebar 1114 Howell Street

Author Signing at K28 for Gold Wake Press from 12:00-4:00

iO: A Journal of New American Poetry/Pinwheel–Thurs. February 27th 7pm at Belltown Brew Pub, 2322 1st Ave.

Dream Horse Press/Hummingbird Press–Thurs. February 27th 7pm at Café Fonté, 1321 First Avenue

Gold Wake Press Reading–Fri. February 28th 7pm at Café Fonté, 1321 First Avenue

Kraken Reading Series AWP Fiesta–Sat. March 1st 6pm Belltown Brew Pub, 2322 1st Ave.

In a few days, I’ll be in Boston.  You can find me at the iO: A Journal of New American Poetry table at Y1 or at the LitBridge table at Q27.

I’m also excited to be reading at:

Gold Wake Press Reading–Wed. March 6th 6:00-9:00 at Trident Booksellers and Cafe, 338 Newbury Street, Boston

Author Signing at K13 for Gold Wake Press from 12:00-2:00

iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, Interrupture, and Jellyfish–Thurs. March 7th 6:30-8:30 at Sweetwater Tavern, 3 Boylston Place, Boston (Hosting)

Salt Hill’s AWP Extravaganza–Thurs. March 7th 7:30-9:30 at Fajitas and ‘Ritas, 25 West Street, Boston

Pony Show: Readings from the Dream Horse Press Stable–Fri. March 8th 8:00 at Aviary, 28 South Street, Jamaica Plain

Kraken Eats Boston Alive–Sat. March 9th 7:00-10:00 at Lilypad, 1353 Cambridge St., Cambridge

I’m thrilled to announce that my third collection Sympathy from the Devil has been accepted for publication by Gold Wake Press for release in 2013. I couldn’t be more psyched!

Informal Invitiations to a Traveler by Jeannie Hoag and me is now available for pre-order and will be released in a few short weeks.  You can pre-order it at bn.com (Barnes and Noble), Amazon in a week or so, or, even more awesome, your local bookstore.

The link for BN is here: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Informal-Invitation-to-a-Traveler/Kyle-McCord/e/9780982630990/?itm=2&USRI=kyle+mccord

Thanks so much to Brian Mihok,  Jared Michael Wahlgren, and Gold Wake Presss for doing such amazing work!  Check it out!

A review of my first book, Galley of the Beloved in Torment, is up at the Colorado Review’s Center for Literary Publishing!

Check it out here.

I’m honored that literary critic Kristina Marie Darling would choose to examine my work with such care and do such an incredible job.

Thanks so much to Kristina and also to the folks over at CLR!