Oklahoma State University assistant professor of poetry Rose McLarney published her second collection of poems, titled It’s Day Being Gone, this week on Penguin.  The collection was selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series. 

 McLarney just completed her first year as a poetry instructor at OSU.  She is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and in 2010 took first place in the National Writing Contest for Alligator Juniper.  Her first poetry collection, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, was published by Stahlecker Collections in 2012. 

It’s Day Being Gone is structured in three parts: contemporary ghost stories, connections between Appalachia and Latin America, and retellings of earlier poems in a contemporary way. The poems frequently examine the quality of memory, as seen in centuries-old folktales, and in how we form recollections of our own lives. 

Advanced praise for It’s Day Being Gone includes:

“A beautiful book, and a haunting one too. McLarney makes things matter. Her poems make you feel very deeply connected – under the skin, in the bone – and therefore more acutely alive.”  -ROBERT WRIGLEY

“It’s easy to say that McLarney loves the land and the people who live close to it, and though that’s true, her intelligence and feelings are also always subject to reappraisal in the light of her own constantly questioning and enlarging vision. Her important poems sing not just with the “the somber percussion/of feed in buckets,” but also with the lyric wisdom of the best poetry.”  -ANDREW HUDGINS

“In poems that are often both celebration and lament, McLarney speaks with an elemental alertness, with sharp-edged perception of the contemporary as well as the folkloric.”  -ROBERT MORGAN