Around the Gate

About M.A. Nicholson

M.A. Nicholson is a New Orleans poet, editor, and educator whose writing appears in Best New Poets 2022, Tilted House Review, Peauxdunque Review, Trampoline Poetry, and elsewhere. An alumna of Loyola University with an M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans—where she served as Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine—M.A. was the recipient of the 2021 Andrea-Saunders Gereighty Academy of American Poets Award and is a co-founder of LMNL Arts

Praise for Around the Gate

In Around the Gate, M.A. Nicholson’s verse artfully engages the enigma of New Orleans, keeping hearts in a parade of memorable wordplay. Nicholson captures innocent eyes observing world stories, crafting the present where traditions are passed as gifts. These poems unveil the preciousness of days, as readers see life flip and unfold with the unexpected. From birthdays, saints’ days, and barbecues to river horizons and storms—from skies or hearts—these poems entice readers to return again and again. Whether ekphrastic praise or “leap-frog” eyes that flutter code, Nicholson’s beautiful verses tell of life travels and contain recipes for the good life amid hurricanes and history. —Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy, Louisiana Poet Laureate (2021-2023), author of Black Creole Chronicles

If the past is not dead and the dead haven’t really passed, I prefer the two wrung tightly around the present, the way that M. A. Nicholson’s strongest poems do. The poet conjures New Orleans brightly, but only as a mixer: The actual spirits are the poet’s intuitive music and storytelling. Consider “I Am Who We Are.” There’s a complicated subsidence and synesthesia in Nicholson’s family poems—they sing heat, they signal sounds, and the pauses feel like emotional endurance. Striking images sweep by and integrate themselves into innovative cadences before I am finished admiring them. “It’ll take never,” she writes, “for the dead to settle down.” —Martha Serpas, author of Côte Blanche and The Dirty Side of the Storm

In this marvelous debut collection, Nicholson embraces the challenges, hazards, and inherent beauty of the demos (“for my city, my people, my family”) through a relentless diversity of aesthetic approaches. The poems never stop at mere effectivity of representation, but instead, always overflow their would-be realist boundaries. Around the Gate is also delightfully free of the illusionism of our times, where overcooked affect aims to reign over every nook of experience. In sharp contrast, Nicholson allows us to relaxedly explore the nails, the jointing, all of the beam work that went into each poem. This devotion to compositional sincerity engenders great trust between author and reader, and the payoff—sheer joy—is instant and lasting. —Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Charm & The Dread and The Cut Point