Book Launch: The Gone Thing by Monica McClure in conversation with Blythe Roberson

Monica McClure’s second collection, The Gone Thing, excavates inheritances—historical, cultural, familial, and economic—as it alternates between magnified and microscopic views of American life. Born in rural Texas in 1986, the oldest of seven children, and once described by Craig Teicher of NPR as “the poster-girl for a new generation of poets,” McClure revises the nuances of class, race, and clashing identities in a polyvocal style that flows out of her experience as an ambiguous academic turned ambivalent corporate creative; a firsthand witness to rural poverty and its colonial origins; a white Chicana with a vexed position in American society; an educated urbanite with a deep connection to the folklore and wisdom of her agricultural-worker ancestors.