WHAT YOU WANT

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

A Washington Post “Best Poetry Collection of 2023”
"Best Poetry of 2023" and Starred Review, Library Journal
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

National Book Award finalist Maureen N. McLane stuns with a precise, perceptive book of poetic meditations.

In her first book of poems since the scintillating More Anon: Selected Poems, Maureen N. McLane offers a bravura, trenchant sounding out of inner and outer weathers. What You Want is a book of core landscapes, mindscapes, and shifting moods. Meditative, lyrical, alert to seasons and pressures on our shared life, McLane registers and shapes an ambient unease. Whether skying with John Constable or walking on wintry paths in our precarious republic, the poet channels what Wordsworth called “moods of my own mind” while she scans for our common horizon.

Here are poems filled with gulls and harbors, blinking red lights and empty lobster traps, beach roses and rumored sharks, eels and crows, wind turbines and superhighways. From Sappho to the Luminist painter Fitz Henry Lane, from constellations to microplastics, What You Want is a book alive to the cosmos as well as to our moment, with its many vexations and intermittent illuminations.

In poems of powerful command and delicate invitation, moving from swift notations to powerfully sustained sequences, this collection sees McLane testing what (if anything) might “outlast the coming heat.” And meanwhile, “There’s no end / to beauty and shit.”

Praise

“A poet whose swerving intelligence is all natural.” –New York Times Sunday Book Review

“‘My given/ name autocorrects/ to moron,’ writes one of our most erudite, witty and sagacious contemporary American poets. Maureen N. McLane’s mercurial meditations on extinction, desire, history and art make the first-person feel both ‘given’ and made.” –Srikanth Reddy, Washington Post

“In these new poems, McLane continues to deliver—more, anon—an intellect at play in irreverent meditations packed with sonic wit. But also—the moon! The sky! This is a speaker who takes the long view. Nothing is sacrosanct.” –Rebecca Morgan Frank, “Harriet Books,” Poetry Foundation

“By turns doomy and gorgeous, instructively self-involved and self-critical . . . What You Want is narrated from the wreck.” – Benjamin Landry, VerseCurious podcast

“Taking readers to deserted shorelines and snowy landscapes, through moments of quiet self-reflection, McLane gauges shifting moods and wants, then lifts them into the world (“Thoughts swell and pulse a mood of mind/ I never notice/ except when stilled”). The results aren’t melancholic but quietly celebratory, rendered as always in McLane’s engaged, engaging voice.”–Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Facing threats of environmental collapse and her own mortality, McLane (Some Say) pushes on the boundaries of selfhood in her enlightening offering . . . Challenging narratives that center the individual at the expense of the collective, McLane imagines a world where ‘anyone could walk in/ my mind’ . . . With humor and insight, this points the way toward a more humane and expansive understanding.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The poetics of spontaneity is not unusual, but McLane brings to it a honed sensibility and voice entirely her own.” –Fred Muratori, Library Journal, starred review