Description
In his new book, The Rounding, Rennie McQuilkin faces down the horrors of 2020-2021, seeing them clearly but focusing on ways in which he and other survivors have found ways to ride out the storm. The poet finds salvation in the natural world, the arts, gardening, and care for others. He clings to a precarious religious faith, just as he clings to the cliff of the troubled world, keeping his fingernails in fighting trim. Rennie McQuilkin was Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2015 through 2018. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. This is his nineteenth poetry collection. He has received a number of awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Connecticut Center for the Book. In 2010 his volume of new and selected poems, The Weathering, was awarded the Center’s annual poetry prize under the aegis of the Library of Congress; and in 2018, North of Eden received the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Poetry. For nine years he directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which he co-founded at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. With his wife, the artist Sarah McQuilkin, he lives at Seabury in Bloomfield, CT.
