Martin McGovern earned his MA in philosophy at Stanford University and his PhD in creative writing/literature at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Chicago Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. He cofounded The Urban Theater Company in Houston and was Associate Artistic Director of Ad Hoc Theater and Artistic Director of Tir Na nOg: An Irish Theater in Denver. His play "Joseph K" earned the 2009 Denver Post Ovation Award for Best New Work. Having taught for Regis University's College for Professional Studies since 2007 and creating its MA in Creative Writing, McGovern is also now cofounder and codirector of that university's Mile-High Low-Residency MFA program.
Martin McGovern's long-awaited, well-constructed first book gives
itself away slowly, artfully. It is carefully considered, quietly
passionate, and deeply humane. -Edward Hirsch
There is an unforsaken paradise in these pages, and a lot of
ungodly anxiety. . . . Like Dubliners, Bad Fame darkens, deepens,
darkens through its sections, understanding with Joyce the tidal
pull of place that will never let us survive if we resist the
current . . . the "blue snow," not of Dublin, but of memory, of
Colorado . . . this extraordinarily unique McGovern flair for the
Keatonish (Buster) aside mixed with lyrical intellection, these
poetic rooms with their many blue lights, direct or indirect, for
us to turn on as night comes on. -David Lazar (from the
foreword)
Here are exacting sentences, any number irregularly hugged into the
ferocious clusters which are Mr. McGovern's poems. My likely
favorite, "If the Light Could Kill Us," does heavy duty as a garden
unfurled at dawn, the beloved "still sleeping, / flame-pink welts
our love leaves on your almost/ too delicate skin, brazen in this
light." And then the assault of a very different sentence, "Samuel
Johnson is dead. And Mrs. Thrale./ And the kind cherub of a
straitjacket/ she kept closeted should reason fail/ him thoroughly,
where's that deck-coat now?" followed by other people's torments
inspected so closely that this morning "violence/ lingers like the
last touch of a season." Hence: "Only as I rise to pull the
window's shade/ do you wake, dusted and dazed, as from a fever."
Strong as they are, the sentences, like the centuries, are treated
pitilessly, as you can hear, yet there is what the poet calls "the
shimmer of a teen movie" throughout. Resilient art, and no
loitering. -Richard Howard
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