Rose McLarney

author of "Its Day Being Gone"

November 4, 2015

Rose McLarney has published two collections of poems, "Its Day Being Gone" (Penguin Books) – winner of the National Poetry Series – and "The Always Broken Plates of Mountains" (Four Way Books). McLarney has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf and the Fellowship of Southern Writers' New Writing Award. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson and taught at the college. She is currently is assistant professor of poetry at Oklahoma State University.

Rose McLarney has won acclaim for image-rich poems that explore her native southern Appalachia, and those who love, live and lose on it. Her second collection broadens these investigations in poems that examine the shape-shifting quality of memory, as seen in folktales that have traveled across oceans and through centuries, and in how we form recollections of our own lives. An opening sequence presents contemporary ghost stories: men who gather at dawn in the gas station parking lots of small towns and the mountain lion that paces the edge of a receding tree line. A middle section draws connections between Appalachia and Latin America, which are places that share qualities of biological and cultural richness – as well as being threatened by modernization. A final sequence retells the stories of earlier poems, posing questions about how we construct our landscapes and frame our views.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2015/rose-mclarney

Last Updated: 12 January 2022