I’d like to thank Laura McCarty for participating in this special reading and discussion. This event is the third of three in partnership with The Anacostia Swim Club. As you may or may not know, it’s currently both unsafe and illegal to swim in the Anacostia River. A social club serving DC area residents, members enjoy arts and culture events, along with service to the community along the Anacostia river corridor. To learn more about the Anacostia Swim Club visit anacostiaswimclub.com.
Full and delightful disclosure: I have some history with this book, having had the opportunity and honor to select it as the winner of Day Eight’s DC Poet Project competition. My introduction to (and full endorsement of) the collection is below:
Laura McCarty’s Just One Swallow gracefully navigates the brutal and beautiful (sometimes in the same poem; occasionally the same line), often on the verge of revelation or else doubling back to track the wreckage. This collection provides a guided tour of her past and present: a daughter, a mother, a traveler, a restless soul in search of feelings attainable only via honesty and experience. Featuring a more analog America readers of a certain age will remember and remote locales rendered at once exotic and unadorned, here are words you can taste, views you can smell, and portraits you can inhabit. Alternating depicting the ‘70s, the South, the pleasure and pain of sexual awakening, bucolic landscapes, and domestic battlegrounds, this work is a sustained shout in defiance of dark and silent spaces. A good poet is able to explore feelings through images that resonate as universal or self-evident truths; an exceptional poet—like McCarty—manages to turn observations into epiphanies one is grateful to obtain, and share. A remarkable and enthusiastically recommended debut.
A longtime resident of the Washington, DC, region, Laura P. McCarty’s creative work has appeared in The Rumpus, Lunch Ticket, descant, Jelly Bucket, the St. Petersburg Review, among other publications, including a family anthology of poetry My Mother, My Daughter, My Sister, My Self. She was a finalist for the 2020 D.C. Poet Project and a finalist for the 2016 Diana Woods Memorial Award in non-fiction. She earned a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Texas, Austin, and her MFA from American University. Find her online at laurapmccarty.com
