Here All Night

"[McDonough is] a poet who moves between the rough-edged, throaty way we speak, and who elevates the language so that we’re more awake to the beauty, absurdity, and possibility in this world—and our short time in it."
—The Boston Globe

“Once again, with immense foresight and lyricism, Jill McDonough proves herself a master of American vernacular. A superb conversationalist, a humanist, she shapes our foibles and triumphs into artful speech that is memorable for its celebration and embrace of humanity. In classrooms, in bars, in cities, Here All Night amplifies the cadences and edges of contemporary life as reported by one of its most gifted poets.”
—Major Jackson

“When you pick up a new book of poems that can make you laugh—snort, really—and weep on any page, you know you’ve struck gold. Assurance, bravura, empathic vulnerability—and a moral urgency—are at the heart of Jill McDonough’s work, in the Ming vase falling forever in rhymed couplets in a museum stairwell, in her poetry-student prisoners, in her wondrous joy in the love of her life, Josey. McDonough’s in-your-face lyrical voice—bumptious, lyrical, defiant, effervescent, refusing to be heartbroken—quakes at nothing, takes on anything (who else would dare Elizabeth Bishop’s classic poem on loss, ‘One Art,’ as McDonough does in ‘The Art of Finding’?) Her embrace is generous, and irreverent. Just when you couldn’t be blamed for thinking nothing’s sacred, Here All Night, reminds you anything could be.”
—Gail Mazur