Jersey Mercy

"Set along the Jersey shore, before and after Hurricane Sandy, these narratives vividly capture the lives and speech of Jersey denizens like Mercy, a young waitresses, and Tino, a boardwalk musician. Piers, racetracks, and bars endure natural disasters. Mercy, too, endures. McCullough's craft is striking. Her portraits are empathic, alive. The lines are drenched with music. Words surge, crash precisely on the page. JERSEY MERCY is a gorgeous interrogation of language and landscape."— Eduardo C. Corral

Laura McCullough’ s books of poetry include Women & Other Hostages (Black Lawrence Press), The Wild Night Dress (selected by Billy Collins in the Miller Williams Poetry Series, University of Arkansas Press), Jersey Mercy (BLP), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (BLP), Panic (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books), Speech Acts (BLP), What Men Want (XOXOX Press), & The Dancing Bear. Her poems & prose have appeared in Best American Poetry (selected by Sherman Alexie), Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Harvard Review, The Writer’ s Chronicle, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Pank, Prairie Schooner, & many other journals and magazines.