I [Heart Symbol] Your Fate

"The poems of Anthony McCann are beautiful, brutal, and unerring. They present us with, or return us to, a complicated, violent, poignant, weird, and mysterious world—a world which is very particularly his, and also our own, re-sung. For some time now I have believed McCann to be one of the finest poets writing today, and as I Heart Your Fate makes clear, he is only getting better."—Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty

In his third collection of poetry, Anthony McCann fuses the worlds of dream, art, love, and brute humanity, taking the redemptive power of the romantic to new and surprising extremes. "I don't have a body to feel afraid," writes McCann, and these poems, bald and imaginative, almost convince the reader it must be so, save for the fact that they are so vitally, essentially human.

From "Of the Mockingbird":

So that once again, beloved readers,
I find that I have died. I die
each time inside my body
each time I eat your food—
O World
(By which I always mean THE LIGHT)

Or let's just say
there's a forehead
between my body and the light
and it deactivates the World

Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. His previous books include Moongarden and Father of Noise. He lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and works with Machine Project.