Tracks - Poetry by Lynn McGee

Publication Date: February 1, 2019
Paperback, 64 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-50-2

We’re out of this book at the press, but fear not, you can still order it from Small Press Distribution by clicking here.

The tracks of which Lynn McGee writes are both literal and metaphorical. Many of these poems are based on observations along her daily commute on the New York City subways, and she captures both the urban landscape and her fellow riders with great sensitivity — particularly those marginalized by race or sexuality.

I’ve seen this all before.
I’ve been the girl popping her gum,
the older woman showing
the shadow between her breasts.
I’ve been the boy wanting to be
part of something that doesn’t
want him, and I’ve been the stranger
watching, unwatched.

But in a greater sense she writes of the tracks that we each leave in one another's lives, and particular those left by her sister who died too young of a brain aneurysm, whose memory haunts her commutes. She writes of finding the brown paper bag into which the paramedics had stuffed her sister's clothing,

put my face into its mouth
and breathed my sister’s
familiar scent — cigarettes,
hair spray, cologne — reliving
her last day, windows down
and hair flying, radio thumping,
the roadside rippling
with tall grass, one fine
apple nestled in her satchel.

These are poems of passage, through space and time, light and dark, through life and beyond it, and McGee exhorts us to breathe in each moment along the way.

“The schedules of ghosts / are more erratic than trains”, she observes in the title poem. “Even the living / stall in dark places, hurtle / toward light.” In the face of uncertainty, of mortality, our best hope, as she puts it in her closing poem, is to

Come home safely tonight to our chaos,
walk quickly from light to light.
I listen for footsteps, the iron gate closing,
knuckles of hinges, the dark vines behind you.

Praise for Lynn McGee and Tracks

“Don’t forget to look up,” Lynn McGee tells the reader in the first poem of Tracks. These are eye-opening poems that transform an ordinary city bus into a box of light rushing through a cityscape and subways move through “crumbling shoulders of tenements.” McGee’s keen lens zooms in and out with utmost clarity. Devoid of judgement, her chiseled language startles with originality. It rushes to the city’s erratic beat, slows to witness girls whipping their heads “as if shaking off water.” Always looking, the poet urgently reports back our human experience with expansive tenderness and physicality. I was particularly drawn to poems about her vibrant sister, and the yearning for her after her death: “…late at night, I watch that actress for a glimpse of you — long face and gray eyes.” This is a tactile poet, adept with syntax and slant rhyme, scent and sound. Lynn McGee’s poems are precise, incisive, and profound. Her subjects are on their way somewhere else. You will want to linger, watching alongside her.

— Pamela Davis, 2014 ABZ Poetry Prize Winner for Lunette

Tracks, by Lynn McGee, carries us like passengers on a train into the human life of the daily commute. We board each poem and take a ride. The scenery streams past us, each of us inhabiting a body that travels through life with a private song streaming into our heads, “One in a million!” Intimate, open-hearted, McGee’s voice as fellow-voyager and guide is pitch perfect. About the stranger standing against “the silver pole, / shoulders back / and feet planted in a plié / so natural…” — he could be anyone, a dancer on the way to rehearsal, or the waiter who will serve you your salad. A child whose mother recently died tells her aunt, “You’re in the wrong / space. Tomorrow, be over there.” Tracks are the prints to follow to your destination. They are the words McGee uses to “to wake myself / and write this life, / into something I want.” These poems will take you there.

— Mary-Sherman Willis, author of Graffiti Calculus, & Grace Notes: Appogiatures, a translation of Jean Cocteau

Lynn McGee sees the world in fierce vivid takes. Her poems explore a woman’s love for a woman, the loss of a beloved sister, and the dailiness of challenges to both family and fellow travelers. Via quick poetic clips and the New York City subway system, she catapults us through tunnels and on elevated tracks into the “hard curves.” We hitch a ride with the poet and her passengers on their commute, and when they detrain, attempting to leave by the in-turnstile, they are given a physical jolt and simultaneously realize there is no exit. In her poem “Ledge,” McGee writes: “A machine was in charge then / and a machine / is in charge now….”

— Joseph Zaccardi, Marin County, California Poet Laureate (2013-2015)
& author of A Wolf Stands Alone in Water

Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books), Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), and two award-winning poetry chapbooks: Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol
Press, 1996). Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She earned an MFA in Poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she held teaching and merit fellowships. She was awarded a MacDowell fellowship, is a winner of the Judith's Room
Award, and taught widely in private and public colleges, secondary schools and literacy programs before becoming a communications manager at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York. She resides in the Bronx, New York. For more
information, visit lynnmcgee.com.