Kathy Mac
Kathy Mac has published two books of poems: The Hundefräulein Papers (2009) about the years she spent as the dogsitter of Elisabeth Mann Borgese, and Nail Builders Plan for Strength and Growth (2002) which won the Gerald Lampert Award and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. As Kathleen McConnell, she’s also published the analytico-poetic book of essays Pain, Porn and Complicity: Women Heroes from Pygmalion to Twilight (2012). Despite a typically wander-filled early-writer’s life, she’s mostly settled in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, where she teaches creative writing and literature at St. Thomas University.
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Human Misunderstanding
“Kathy Mac sees inside language-as-propaganda, identifying all the twists and turns that facts suffer as they become half-truths or false justifications for evils. She knows and shows that the rhetoric of the War on Terror enacts a War on Truth. Accept no substitutes for her truth-telling, which is liberating.”
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The Hundefraulein Papers
Poems
Hunde/fräulein: Dog/nanny. For five and a half years (1995-2001) Kathy Mac lived in Sambro Head, NS, looking after anywhere from four to twelve English Setters. The post entailed maintaining the ocean-side doghouse and looking after the many, varied houseguests of the hundemutter – ocean activist Elisabeth Mann Borgese, youngest daughter of Thomas Mann. These poems take their tone from the days and dogs that inspired them – by turns extravagant, intense, celebratory, wistful.
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Nail Builders Plan for Strength and Growth
Poems
“Poets with Kathy Mac’s impeccable technical skill are not too hard to find, but very few can touch her for emotional power, thematic range, gentle humour or quiet courage. As Robert Heinlein said of another writer, these poems should be served with a whisk broom, so that the customer may brush the sawdust off himself when he gets back up.” –Spider Robinson, author of Telempath (1976), The Free Lunch (2001) and many others in between