Muddy Matterhorn

March 16, 2020
McHugh (Upgraded to Serious) demonstrates in her playful and perceptive ninth book a penchant for rhymes and puns as she questions technology and urges the reader to look closely at exactly what she might not want to see, including “the terror in the mirror.” Over six sections, these poems, mostly one-to-two pages, though some as long as four, range from lighthearted and humorous (she urges the groom in “Epithalamium” “to keep pecker in pants”) to epigrammatic (“Best be humble since we can’t/ Tell much apart”). Twitter references, colloquial expression (“out with it” and “just come to grips”), and wordplay (“Get someone/ gunger-ho or gunga-dinner”) rub up against Yeats, Shakespeare, a hard look at dying (“It’s time to study/ What the dying do/ Who sob to laugh./ Who sing to weep”), and an even harder look at herself (“this muddy Matterhorn”). McHugh asks in “Long Enough”: “Just to be freed from greed,/ just to be un-timeshared,/ must the tender ones forever// live in hunger or in coldest/ solitude?” The answer for McHugh seems to be “no” as she urges “curiosity instead of greed,” offering readers an alternately whimsical and serious meditation on contemporary existence.

Starred review from April 1, 2020

In her latest collection, the first in ten years, McHugh (Hinge & Sign) explores culture and technology, philosophy and politics, love and divorce, and dozens of topics in her own inimitable way: "My semiotics are undone by Ambien./ The airs are not reliable./ I find my meaning stymied through/ the signage/ I'm addicted to." McHugh's poems can be biting and serious, even cerebral, but also riotously hilarious. In "Everybody Has a Fatal Disease," she says, "In the night, while it's quiet, I run/ some lips across its ribs, some eyeteeth over/ knuckle-bones, some mind downspine." McHugh is especially good at wordplay, and rhymes are surprising, showing up in end rhymes, of course, but they can also be in the middle of the next line or stanza; as she explains, "We breathe because we rhyme." When she needs to, she invents a word for the sake of the piece: "What could grow in summer// grew; it snew from Halloween to Easter. VERDICT In a rich work that embraces life while pushing back on anything that restricts our reach, McHugh again proves herself to be a master poet.--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2020
If you had only about a hundred pages from which to teach all of contemporary poetry, McHugh's new collection would not be a bad place to begin. The multi-award-winner's first book in a decade reflects her habit of reaching for whatever tool or material she needs?rhyme, meter, pared-to-the-bone imagism, or luxuriant abstraction?to get the work of each poem done. This breadth of style and skill allows her to range freely from difficult intellections to spit take worthy jokes without losing consistency of voice or perspective. But McHugh doesn't demonstrate virtuosity for its own sake. These poems are consistently politically and socially aware: even the most interior lyrics project the world at this minute, as in "Missing Glove," which interrogates the discomfort of sitting safely in the car when a homeless person approaches. McHugh's wordplay is peerless. Poems rest in anagrams, palindromes, and neologisms like cremaindered, and the sonic pleasure of her riffs on assonance and slant rhyme delights the ear. This is a high-impact book that is impossible to exhaust.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)