Thirteen years ago, I took a graduate-level poetry-writing course with Andrei Codrescu at Louisiana State University. He taught me a valuable lesson about the political function of poetry, introduced me to Alice Notley and Anselm Hollo — poets whose writing I still love — and challenged me a great deal to experiment with language and voice. He is an excellent teacher, an intimidating scholar, and a rigorous critic, a writer whose poetry, prose, and commentary I greatly admire. I was honored when he ran the very first nonfiction piece I ever published at Exquisite Corpse, and I am honored, today, to read what he has to say about Wolf Skin:
Who knew that a poet would come by one day and reanimate the ancient, tragic fairytale figures of Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel? And that she would not only reanimate those uneasy ghosts stalking the roots of memory, but also the ghostly plants and animals of the world that devoured and mourned them? Well, she has: it’s Mary McMyne, with her flute of life, blowing healing air into archetypal pain. One by one her ancestral victims rise from the cannibal fog of our oldest past to live in these marvelous prose-poetry stereopticons. Stories to be truly chilled by, wolf hair by wolf hair.
— Andrei Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2014
MARY MCMYNE 