Kathleen McGookey is a prose poet who's written about the loss of her parents juxtaposed with the joy of giving birth to her firstborn. Her new collection Stay, published by Press 53, is a word-album that preserves those moments she wishes she could keep forever.
McGookey says, “A prose poem is a poem with no line breaks but has every other element you would expect in a poem: imagery, attention to sound, metaphor, simile, word play, that type of thing. I’m really drawn to it because it’s such a welcoming form. It looks like it could be anything. A reader could begin reading one of my poems not realizing it’s a poem and then be so drawn in and taken by it that he or she will continue to read.”
And McGookey says prose poems can disguise themselves as stories, letters, recipes, a set of instructions, and even a rejection letter from a publisher. It's that element of surprise and changeability that appeals to her as a writer. Like the form itself, McGookey chose her collection’s title, Stay, for its multiple meanings.
In Stay, McGookey writes about grief at the loss of her parents within weeks of each other at the same time she experienced the joy of motherhood with the arrival of her first child, Charlie. While writing offered some measure of healing, she found the effect of talking about her grief with a therapist was far different than putting it onto the page.
“When I wrote these poems of grief and loss, I felt like I didn’t really have a choice,” she says. “The emotion was all around me. What had happened had happened, and it seemed inescapable. I just had to write those poems.”
McGookey says the collection is a way of fixing those treasured moments in time, bidding them to "stay." She wanted he parents to stay. “And I wanted my son to stay an infant. I have a poem about giving my son a bath, and it was a moment of joy. I wanted that moment to stay. I wanted time to stop.”
Kathleen McGookey will be among the authors participating in the sixth Annual Author Hop at Kazoo Books, 2413 Parkview Avenue in Kalamazoo, on Saturday, December 12. More than 20 authors will be there to sign books and meet the public. McGookey will appear from 2 to 3:30 p.m.
Kathleen McGookey’s prose poems and translations have appeared in many journals and anthologies. The forthcoming anthology Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence includes her work. And her poetry collection At the Zoo will be published by White Pine Press in spring 2017. McGookey has received grants from the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, the Arts Fund of Kalamazoo County, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She has taught creative writing at Hope College, the Interlochen Arts Academy, and Western Michigan University. McGookey lives in Middleville, Michigan, with her family.
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