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About Me
- John Macker
- Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
- poet, "in the middle of life", renegade wordslinger, desert defender, essayist, playwright. Author of several books of poetry including Adventures In The Gun Trade,(2004) Burroughs At Santo Domingo (1998) Wyoming Arcane (mad blood #5, 2006), Woman of the Disturbed Earth, Underground Sky, Disassembled Badlands (the Badlands Trilogy), Blood in the Mix (with Lawrence Welsh), Las Montanas de Santa Fe, The Royal Road: Impressions of El Camino Real, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away Selected Poems 1983-2018 (finalist for an Arizona/New Mexico Book Award), Atlas of Wolves. (2019) Forthcoming: Desert Threnody Essays and short fiction.
2 comments:
a finalist for a 2021 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award for fiction anthology!
What I like most about Poet John Macker's writing is that he's always pushing the limits of language. DESERT THRENODY is a kind of sampler of his writing life, in that it contains, most unusually, a mixture of critical essays, a play, short stories, and occasional passages of natural history. But whether he is writing critical prose or theatrical dialogue, his language keeps wanting to break into poetry--not from ostentation, I think, but because language never goes quite far enough for him, and he's always reaching for the meaning just beyond words. His subject is the American West, and he may be the best comprehensive thinker and creative artist we have dealing with that huge, still undigested slab of the American past and present. There have been hundreds of movies, and probably thousands of books, about the American West, and yet it is still a dark, terrifying shadow in our national consciousness, a place haunted by ruthless outlaws and a brutally vast and arid emptiness, which most people would prefer to consign to happy contained memories of TV shows like Broken Arrow and Gunsmoke. There is a deadly edge to the West that will kill you faster than an alkali water hole, or than an Apache's knife to your throat. In DESERT THRENODY, Macker goes for that edge in every piece he pens, whether reviewing the writers of the West like Stuart Perkoff and Kell Robertson, who saw writing itself as an act of walking between life and death, of fighting against "the inescapable destinies of those betrothed to inhospitable landscapes"; or recording in drama and fiction his own battles to escape the pain of the overwhelming loneliness and mind-and-body-scorching heat of the desert places he's lived so much of his life in. What Macker is doing in DESERT THRENODY is really trying to define the parameters of both the life and literature of the West--not the West of mythmakers like Zane Grey or Owen Wister or Louis L'Amour--but a West that embodies, "the holy matrimony of echoes and canyons," that uplifts as much as it terrifies, that teaches as much as it mystifies, that is "the intersection of sacred directions, the celestial versus the subterranean," and provides maybe the best touchstone we have in America by which to examine "the sum total of our own life."
⸺ Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe A Biography of Jack Kerouac
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