EP 23:  The poems in ANDREW McCARRON’s first published collection, Mysterium, celebrate a capacity for wonder.  The work traces out the parameters of subjectivity while simultaneously yearning for states of feeling and mind beyond intelligibility and selfhood.  Inspired by Medieval mysticism and American Transcendentalism, the poems are challenging without purposefully cultivating the opaque, and convey an infectious benevolence and love for self, others, and world.  Devoid of either sentimentality or empty language games, Mysterium offers readers a substantial form of life.  “We’ve lost our ticket to return to where / We were when we leapt upward like deer / To arrive here:  into another never before. / Let’s say, each moment away was an urge; / Each dream a tear pure enough to restore.”

ANDREW McCARRON is a poet born and raised in the Hudson River Valley who received degrees from Bard College, Harvard Divinity School, and the City University of New York.  He teaches at Trinity School and Bard College and splits his time between Manhattan and Poughkeepsie, New York.

First edition paperback, April 2011, 64 pp., sewn, bound, and printed in Italy, with a two-color cover and a black and white photograph of the author on the frontispiece.  

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