Aaron McNally’s poetry is driven by rhythm and sound, but guided by emotion. As readers, we are challenged to pinpoint the complexities of emotional expression each poem contains. Simultaneously, a strong cerebral bent works an angle on meaning that uses metaphor, imagery, juxtaposition, poetic form, and an inner narrative voice. Where we end up rests on our ability to take a journey, propelled along by rhythm, absorbing the emotional atmosphere, our destination up for grabs as McNally sets our heads spinning, then gently, with careful consciousness, sets us down. It's true, I weep too much for sudden images that yield so little meaning in their stretch toward metaphor, McNally writes in “ Space for an Emanation (A Poetics)” with honesty about the love of using imagery, then continues by fleshing out the concept with striking and evocative imagery, that, scantily-clad in forests of inane proportions, as Gods depicted clammy in mass-market paperbacks McNally displays a tight grasp of emotional truth and concise imagery in “An Air (for Nick Moudry),” while asking us to consider the concept of Aesthetics and the making of art and it’s relationship to desire. An Air (for Nick Moudry) When you dredge that absent affection, the bored image and the ensuing beauty, you will see the way in which Aesthetics thrives on this dichotomy: hunger and denial. In that crossing the pictures slip out, moans of the little bellyaches that a boy earns from his books, the birds he draws to chirp his sadness into sound. It’s that ability to successfully synthesize thought and emotion into a powerful package of rhythm and sound, imagery and form, that makes McNally, and this first book, an important new poet worth collecting. This fine letterpress first book will be a keepsake in the future of Aaron McNally’s career in poetry. From Out of the Blue: Caveworks Press Newly Published
Out of the Blue
Aaron James McNally
 
Book List Reading Schedule NEW! Out of the Blue Order The Process Submissions Links Art: Other Home
The Flags, and How We Waived Them
 
We shed an inevitable trace
of learning when we dropped that rag,
but without that knowledge we
could now succumb to vindication.
 
The consequence of that desire was the skyline,
and it hung, presidentially there, mocking
our tattered clothing and our seasonal discontent,
embittered in the ash of snowfall.
 
Caught in this new television, metaphor,
we were still unable to refrain
from understanding, and so we tried instead
to sing the hymns that came easily from memory.
 
All static and shiver, we now had a new urge,
similar to the ones of before. Picking up the shaft
of that colonial heft, we lifted the skirt
from the floor and stabbed the post into the air.
 
And then the song, newly electric, became again engaged.
O what a great country to learn to despise so and to love again.
 
 
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About Aaron McNally
 
Aaron James McNally has published poetry in 6 X 6, Effing Magazine, Cricket Online Review and Inner Weather. His reviews of contemporary poetry have appeared in Rain Taxi and the Cream City Review. He is the editor and publisher of the Indivia chapbook series, and has served as a volunteer assistant editor at the North American Review. He has 
written news and features for the Northern Iowan and the 
Waterloo/Cedar Falls Courier. Over the years, he has edited a number of small-press publications involving news, features and poetry such as Cant, Survey and Circuit. Aaron is currently an MA candidate in English Literature at the University of Northern Iowa. 
 
 
A line of poetry from “Nocturne” ready to be cast on the Intertype machine
Out of the Blue by Aaron James McNally
2007, Now available.
 
Letterpress printed in an edition of 250, 32 pages. Soft blue cover with illustration by Julie Russell-Steuart. $20.00
I consider all of the poems in this volume to be narrative lyrics. The voices come out of nowhere—out of the sky or sea, or out of the blue: unannounced, and from an emotional place that I am unfamiliar with. Ezra Pound once wrote that the best way to describe an emotion is to be clear, but what if one does not know who one is, or who one’s narrator is, or what the emotion is, or where it comes from or why? I have attempted to transcribe these
voices as accurately as possible.
 –Aaron James McNally
 
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