Glass Factory

About Marilyn McCabe

Marilyn McCabe’s first collection, Perpetual Motion, was published by The Word Works in the Hilary Tham Capital Collection. She received A Room of Her Own Foundation’s 2012 Orlando Prize and her work appears in journals such as Nimrod, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly, her French translations and songs on Numero Cinq, and a video-poem on The Continental Review.

Praise for Glass Factory

Marilyn McCabe knows that darkness doesn’t come onward but we are “falling toward it, and sometimes / it is beautiful, framed in flame.” I think of Mahmoud Darwish who believed that clarity is the original mystery. In McCabe’s clarities, too, lie her deepest surprises, and like the fisherman in one of her poems, she relies “on the tacit consonance of ice.” And her music! There is so much astonishment in her syntax, in tonalities. I love how in each poem’s pulse, the heart is “driving its cargo, / a shipment that might itself ignite.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa

Chemically speaking, glass is neither a liquid nor a solid; it is an amorphous solid and has properties of both states of being. It is precisely these kinds of ambiguities of experience, internal and external, that Marilyn McCabe’s crisp yet sonically adroit poems seek to reveal. In a world in which all matter is destined for ruin, we find a speaker who again and again not only holds the elusive present in her fierce attention but also praises the very processes that, while ushering new fruit from the trees, erase all that has been, including the familiar self, which is at every moment already “turning, turning” into something other.
—Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City

For a poet so unflinchingly aware of how separate we are from the natural world, and from each other, it must seem an act of faith to make poems like these, poems that act as remarkable testimony to how the grace of seeing connects us through particulars to the ineffable wisdom of the everyday world.
—James Harms, author of The Only Lie Worth Telling: New & Selected Poems

Marilyn McCabe writes, “My eye is still on the x,” exerting her power as a poet focusing rigorously on the things of this world. But her wonderful new book, Glass Factory, also chronicles how things disappear, despite the imagination’s struggle to pin them down: x, it turns out, can mean a “criss-cross of contrail” vanishing from the sky. With her spare, brave language, McCabe confronts how words fall apart and the sentence cannot hold, tussling with the slippages dividing thing from no thing, self from other, and self from no self. She pays constant homage to our glass-like nature—fragile, glittering, there and not-there—in a poetry of sparkle and transparency.
—Jay Rogoff, author of Venera