FRAGMENTS OF AN AMERICA
I write for the poets
Who aren’t poets
“Poetry”
Poet, essayist, historian, and longtime arts advocate Chris McNally’s Fragments of an America, Volume II, is a compelling collection of poetry that examines the contradictions of contemporary American life through a voice at once intimate, erudite, playful, and unflinching.
Following his first volume, Fragments of an America, Volume I, published in 2016, McNally’s new collection moves across a remarkable range of subjects, from political fracture and spiritual awakening to love, grief, personal integrity, and the search for wisdom in an increasingly divided culture, often with a wry sense of humor.
At the heart of McNally’s work is a sustained inquiry into what it means to live with integrity amid political, cultural, and personal uncertainty. His poetry moves fluidly between the public and private spheres, asking how “We the people / Who show up / Quiet as the sunrise,” might navigate loss, love, history, faith, and responsibility while continuing to seek wisdom.
FRAGMENTS OF AN AMERICA Volume Two
Available where all fine books are sold:
Itasca Books ■ Bookshop.org ■ Amazon
Join the wait list for Volume One’s reprinting here.
“Fragments of an America, Volume Two travels from mythos to the twenty-first century in a voice that whispers, shouts, grieves, loves, and rages. A keen attentiveness to the natural world lightly holds McNally’s range from classical forms to ekphrastic conversations with contemporary images. These poems offer a world where: ‘The fireflies arrive like clockwork / Inside the eternity / Of this little shack.’”
—REBECCA CHACE, author of Talking to the Wolf
The collection is a “fierce meditation on the American character. . . . Fragments of an America, Volume Two is a playful but serious, honest, jagged, and necessary work for our era of civil fracture. . . . A must read in the current situation we find ourselves in.”
—SYLVIE BERTRAND, cofounding editor at Cagibi
Our hands clap like thunder
We pawned from the universe
“Thus Spake Sinatra”
And as twilight’s blanket
Enfolds us in its endless hue
The fireflies arrive like clockwork
Inside the eternity
Of this little shack
“Luka”
When circumstance meets spine
The old screw of courage turns again
New words toll from the archipelago
Of faith above a sea of mendacity
“Liz Cheney’s Horse”
Freedom to speak
Freedom to plow
Freedom to lay on your back
And watch the clouds meander
Past the seeded tip of grass
Bobbing in your teeth
“Reflections on Unity 2017”
In this epoch of final battles
Wisdom is the better shield
“Groundwater Births a Bard”
Let us learn forgiveness
From the twining night
We are the sunset
We walk off into
“The Sweetness of Life”
I was born when she leaned into me
And die in the heaven of her hair
“Love Like This”
He reads Homer to her at night
She lays with her head on his leg
And listens to his voice roll like the horizon
Into the endless and her eyes glisten
“Kings and Queens”
ABOUT CHRIS McNALLY
Chris McNally was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1960. While pursuing an undergraduate degree in history at the University of California, Berkeley, he also studied at the Université du Bénin in Togo, West Africa, and in Bordeaux, France. During this period, he worked for a season on a salmon boat in the waters off Southeast Alaska, experiences that contributed to an education spanning history, literature, international study and working life.
McNally later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University. An avid historian, he completed the long-form essay Principles for a Profound Leadership: The Self-Worth of a Nation in 2012, examining the cumulative influence of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy.
In 2016, he published Fragments of an America, Volume One. Throughout his writing career, McNally has also raised two sons while building and managing a successful construction project management firm specializing in fine homes.
He currently lives outside Hudson, New York, with his wife, Tamara.
