Distributaries

Poetry chapbook by Laura McRae

“Laura McRae's debut chapbook is an ambitious long poem that distributes a wide range of film, visual art, and literary references across a personal and public narrative that relies upon water for order, just as humans history has done. Obviously impressive at the level of structure and endurance, the key recommendation we make about this text is its scoured, careful language: McRae's precision, brevity, and magpie eye make this a quite unusual debut, one that makes each word earn its keep.”

Frog Hollow Press

“Though Distributaries starts with a defined moment in the speaker’s life, it resists a straightforward narrative. Instead it represents an almost dreamlike state, where the speaker passes from one reflection to another, connecting memories to images to literary and artistic references—from The Italian Job to Georgia O’Keeffe to Van Gogh to John Travolta. Similarly, the speaker alludes to travels in locations as varied as China, Oregon, Scotland, and the Mediterranean, each place evoked only briefly, fleetingly, in a process that resembles free association. […]

Distributaries can be seen as imitating memory itself in the way it highlights at once the immediacy and the transience of lived experience, and in the way that it suggests the parts of our memories that remain obscured, just slightly out of reach.”

Review by Annick MacAskill - the Town Crier