Out Here

By Joseph Keller McNeilly

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966145232
• ISBN13: 9780966145236
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Chatoyant
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.5" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Showcases this remarkable poet's best work

Joseph Keller McNeilly's Out Here showcases this remarkable poet's best work over the past decade. Many of these poems reflect back to his first thirty years as a farm worker and an outsider within Northern Indiana's Amish community. McNeilly's verse speaks directly, honestly, and memorably to the reader's heart, soul and imagination. Before the Doors Open: In the very early morning/before even the birds/or the paper boys are about, the windows/of the corner restaurant are set/rattling with music. It's a party/of two Spanish-speaking men/and a woman, mopping floors/and wiping down tables/to the squawk of accordions and organs and/the bleat of trumpets, all punctuated/by a big clear voice/clearly in love/with someone, somewhere. The men/joke I think/with the woman, though it is hard to see/through the steam on the rattling windows and hear/through the strange, joyful music, and even/if I could hear/I wouldn't fully understand.//Later/when the doors open/I slip in for my coffee, hear sadly only/poor worried Mozart spilling/from the speakers, while tucked out of sight back there/among the noise of pots and pans and the deep-fat fryer/the party goes on/without me, without the music, or/any of us all.

Out Here

Joseph McNeilly's collection of poems, Out Here, is so brilliant that it almost defies description. This diverse collection rivals the work of Anna Akhmatova and Charles Baudelaire. Sharing their intense poetic sensibility, McNeilly insightfully interprets what could have been mundane experiences, revealing instead the power that underlies daily life. His poetry is beautiful in its honesty, ecstatic in its rythm, inspiring in its vision. McNeilly captures the tender ("When it Happens"), the viscious ("Every House a Dog"), the surreal ("Autopsies"), the humorous ("Queen"), and everything in between. All share a lucid clarity that make you want to laugh, cry, and scream at once with the immense realization that you're alive. Universal enough to appeal to anyone who is living in this wild world.

Behold!

Behold, the apple without the pie. Behold the burning tree in your own back yard. These flame-hardened, lucid poems take you there. Not for the timid. The bare imagination stalks these pages. Behold.

Without comparison, one of the best books of poetry...

This book doesn't need to be reviewed. This books needs to be read and read aloud. Like the sweet and sometime manipulative words between friends, I wish I could grab your shoulders and say Try this! These poems are amazing and true. McNeilly has conspicuously re-invented the narrative poem and found the perfect predicament, the perfect line, the perfect ending. In other words, the perfect book of poems that I have been searching for a long time.