I Heart Your Fate

By Anthony McCann

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• It’s strange to be seen, I’ve said to a tree
  To have trembled so much while breathing the air
  
  With humor, irreverence, and sincere longing, McCann’s poems sever the distinction between dream and reality, person and animal. “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.

• Reading [I Heart Your Fate] is like wading into the Adriatic Sea on an overcast July morning and feeling something slimy grip around your calf—so you look down and feel relieved that (of course, haha) it’s just seaweed—then you realize it’s actually *not* just seaweed, but rather the pulsing tentacle of some creature so slobbery and horrifying not even your own mother would believe your description of it. That is, if you lived to tell them, which you won’t. Sucked under, friend, into the unforgiving brine.
  Jeremy Schmall, The Best American Poetry Blog
  
  Throughout this playful, heartfelt and enriching collection, McCann demonstrates that the truth surrounds us all; our best way of connecting with it is through compassion and love. With equal parts exuberance and dread, the speaker encourages us to “waste the whole day feeling these things.”
  Nate Pritts, Boston Review
  
  To find yourself in the middle of an Anthony McCann poem is to be surrounded by a rich, descriptive elegance reminiscent of the overpowering sense of collision and clarity that we call a dream. What appears simple becomes infinitely dynamic and fractured, objects and landscapes shift and wreck, a disturbing logic aligns what we don’t acknowledge with what we never expected.
  Nick Sturm, H_ngm_n
  
  I ♥ Your Fate is a lyric book of poems that will make you feel like picking up a guitar, a paintbrush, dance your ass off alone in your room. That is to say, McCann will make you feel alive.
  Matthew Dickman, Tin House
  
  Anthony McCann’s third collection of poetry reveals a preoccupation with how we encounter, experience and process the world around us. He places emphasis on processes of perception and modes of discovery, and the objects in McCann’s view are charged with vitality: material is imbued with life, the inanimate is animated. And though at times what’s seen is threatening or ominous, these poems are ultimately celebratory, and the world is one in which “it’s nice to be held while watching the waves.”
  Jennifer Moore, Another Chicago Magazine
  
  How wonderful to be “hammered in distinctness”—that is, with clarity and detail—and also to BE hammered “indistinctness” (i.e. the opposite—unclear, ambiguous, vague, connotative) at the very same time. There’s something nearly primordial about these poems. We read them as they come to be, reaching prophetically, apocalyptically, lovingly, and elliptically toward their own ends, which are our ends—our FATE—as we read them.
  Matt Hart, Coldfront
  
  McCann’s book is funny, beautifully crafted, challenging, and refreshing.
  Luisa Muradyan, Front Porch Journal
  

• Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author I am the dead, who, you take care of me (November 2023), of Thing Music (Wave Books, 2014), I ♥ Your Fate (Wave Books, 2011), Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006) and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). In addition to these three collections, he is one of the authors of Gentle Reader! (2007), a book of erasures of the English Romantics, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the University of California-Riverside's Palm Desert MFA program. He is the “Poet Laureate” of Machine Project and also teaches courses at the California Institute of the Arts.