Sugar Zone

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Fierce, surreal, ecstatic, and passionately transcendent, the sixty-two beautifully crafted poems in Mary Mackey's Sugar Zone offer depth and complexity while at the same time remaining entirely accessible. Mackey's range is extraordinary. Although over half the poems take as their subject the great cities and tropical rainforest of Brazil, which Mackey knows intimately, her real subject is a journey through a visionary landscape of the human heart which lies somewhere between Saint Theresa's Inner Castle and the thicket of Eros. “In Sugar Zone, Mary Mackey takes you on a fascinating journey to the interior, somewhere between Saint Theresa’s Inner Castle and the thicket of Eros—but also a place of desperate actuality, even if it is on the other side of the world. Mackey joins other visionary poets of dépaysement—Henri Michaux in Asia, John Ash in Anatolia, Sharon Doubiago in Peru, Lorca in Manhattan. But Mackey really seems to recover a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forró, and death. Please read ‘Cold Snap’’ who but Mackey could have written it? Sugar Zone authoritatively creates a language and a culture; but the lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home.” --Dennis Nurkse “Mary Mackey’s new collection Sugar Zone is the culmination of many trips to Brazil. Most poems crackle with lush imagery; others are stark and draw their strength from the wisdom of the saying. These are death haunted poems but full of the vitality of the jungle, the favelas of Rio, the Amazon itself.” --Marge Piercy “Mackey’s crisp-edged perceptions are set down in these poems with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly unflinching eye.” --Jane Hirshfield

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About Mary Mackey

MARY MACKEY is the author of thirteen novels and six collections of poetry. Related through her father's family to Mark Twain, she graduated from Harvard and received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. In her twenties, she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. For a number of years, she has been traveling to Europe and Brazil and incorporating her experiences into her fiction and poetry. Mackey’s novels, which have sold over a million copies, have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List and been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. At present, she lives in northern California with her husband Angus Wright, and is Professor Emeritus of English at California State University. To learn more about her you are invited to visit her webpage at: www.marymackey.com. She can also be found on Facebook.

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