Small Murders
Small Murders (New Issues, 2006)
“Carrie McGath’s debut collection, Small Murders, looks for evidence with a trained, meticulous, inexhaustible eye. From indentations in beds to material inside a glove box, from the bent back of an assiduous artist to the wooden closet of a boudoir, McGath seeks out the tiny parts, the small murders, of the mind, the heart, the psyche, in order to detect the who, why, and wherewithal of love.”
~~ Metta Sama, Her Circle Ezine
“Carrie McGath is, to borrow her own words, a ‘happy woman of knots.’ In her poems you will meet a windshield vandal whose weapon is lipstick in the shade of Fire Engine #45; a coveter of murdered dolls; a dashboard Mary who’s been jilted; a doctor who holds up a newborn ‘like fresh catch off a pier’; Frida Kahlo folded up in somebody’s sock drawer. You will encounter rape and ruination, sadness, dissection, miracles. These ruthlessly unsentimental, dark, angry-funny poems are spoken by ‘the loneliest girl in the time-zone’ and profferred—she pulls it off somehow—with an irrepressible good cheer.”
~~ Nancy Eimers
“These poems restore the sense of tension to the present tense, as their speakers contemplate unsettling hallucinatory events and impressions. Beneath this restless, disoriented, ‘terrifyingly calm’ voice you can detect a muted hysteria clenching and muttering like Edgar Allan Poe on Zoloft at 4 A.M Something not quite usual is pulsing away here, curled up in the glovebox, the closet, the chest of drawers, and it has something personal and pointed to say. Meet Carrie McGath’s spooky entourage of mannequins, dolls, libidinous objects, figures and effigies that alternately interrogate and judge, constantly threatening to leave, and threatening never to leave. Then try—you can always try—to forget them.”
~~ J. Allyn Rosser