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Set on the marshlands of working-class southern New Jersey, Python with a Dog Inside It traces the tangled story of two gay brothers as they endeavor to survive their mother’s erratic and escalating violence. They retreat to the privacy of suburban woods and swamps, a world of their own glimmering with ruin and possibility: abandoned furniture, mud-caked jewelry, a time machine. The poems in this collection occupy, as Judith Herman describes it, the space between “the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim it aloud.” Ultimately, Python with a Dog Inside It is not only a story of survival, but one of redemption; by proclaiming the events of a rigid, oppressive childhood, McDonough invents a future beyond it, one marked by radical openness, hope's flame brighter for the darkness.
“McDonough’s Python with a Dog Inside It deserves wide attention and the highest of praise... [Its] precise articulations of anxious need—through sensory image, sound, rhythm and syntax—are utterly absorbing, as the scenes move in and out of self, forward and backward in time, with the poems’ own logic of echoing patterns and a voice that makes a whole out of the shattering, glittering pieces of a particular life. Such clarity of vision is how the best of poetry makes our own lives feel clearer too.”
— Debra Nystrom, author of Night Sky Frequencies: New and Selected Poems
Cover art: Luca Brandi
Cover design: Zoe Norvell