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Travelers with No Ticket Home
Poetry. In this stunning new collection, Mackey offers her readers fifty-eight intensely lyrical poems written with the same skill and passion that made her previous collection Sugar Zone winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Complex yet entirely accessible, the poems in TRAVELERS WITH NO TICKET HOME form a visionary meditation on nature, childhood, the destruction of the rainforest of the Amazon, and the real and psychological landscape of travel. Taking us from a small farm in Western Kentucky to the jungles of Brazil, Mackey touches on the broader human feelings of wonder, displacement, grief, love, and love's endless complications. Here too, for the first time, readers will find Mackey's complete "Kama Sutra of Kindness," a series of seven love poems written over the last thirty years.
"Mary Mackey joins other visionary poets of dépaysement... recovering a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forró, and death. The lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home."—Dennis Nurske
"Mary Mackey joins other visionary poets of dépaysement... recovering a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forró, and death. The lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home."—Dennis Nurske
- GenresPoetry
82 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2014
About the author
Mary Mackey
42 books60 followers"New York Times" bestselling author Mary Mackey's published works include 13 novels, and 7 books of poetry including "Sugar Zone" which won the 2012 PEN Oakland Award for Literary Excellence. They have sold over a million and a half copies and been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, and Finnish.
Mary is related through her father's family to Mark Twain. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. During the early 1970s she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. For the last twenty-five years, she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband Angus Wright. The rainforests of the Amazon and the people of Brazil have been a major influence on two of her collections of poetry, "Sugar Zone" and "Travelers With No Ticket Home", and on two of her novels: "The Widow's War," and "The Village of Bones," which is a prequel to her bestselling Earthsong Serious about Prehistoric Europe.
From 1989 to 1992 she served as Chair of PEN American Center, West. Currently, she is Emeritus Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.
While her poetry has mainly centered around the traditional lyric themes of love, death, and nature, her novels have ranged from the Midwestern United States to the Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. A screenwriter as well as a novelist, she has sold feature scripts to Warner Brothers as well as to various independent film companies.
Mary has lectured at many places including Harvard and the Smithsonian. Additionally, she has contributed to such diverse print and on-line publications as The Chiron Review, Redbook, and Salon. She occasionally writes comedy under the pen name "Kate Clemens".
Her popular "People Who Make Books Happen" interview series can be found on her Blog http://marymackey.com/the-writers-jou.... A free resource for writers and readers, it contains interviews with experts on various topics including "How To Get An Agent," and "Helping Independent Bookstores Survive and Thrive." You are invited to ask Mary questions about these interviews and other topics by going to the Goodreads "Ask The Author" section of this profile page or by visiting her website at http://marymackey.com/.
The photograph of Mary Mackey was taken by Irene Young.
Mary is related through her father's family to Mark Twain. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. During the early 1970s she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. For the last twenty-five years, she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband Angus Wright. The rainforests of the Amazon and the people of Brazil have been a major influence on two of her collections of poetry, "Sugar Zone" and "Travelers With No Ticket Home", and on two of her novels: "The Widow's War," and "The Village of Bones," which is a prequel to her bestselling Earthsong Serious about Prehistoric Europe.
From 1989 to 1992 she served as Chair of PEN American Center, West. Currently, she is Emeritus Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.
While her poetry has mainly centered around the traditional lyric themes of love, death, and nature, her novels have ranged from the Midwestern United States to the Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. A screenwriter as well as a novelist, she has sold feature scripts to Warner Brothers as well as to various independent film companies.
Mary has lectured at many places including Harvard and the Smithsonian. Additionally, she has contributed to such diverse print and on-line publications as The Chiron Review, Redbook, and Salon. She occasionally writes comedy under the pen name "Kate Clemens".
Her popular "People Who Make Books Happen" interview series can be found on her Blog http://marymackey.com/the-writers-jou.... A free resource for writers and readers, it contains interviews with experts on various topics including "How To Get An Agent," and "Helping Independent Bookstores Survive and Thrive." You are invited to ask Mary questions about these interviews and other topics by going to the Goodreads "Ask The Author" section of this profile page or by visiting her website at http://marymackey.com/.
The photograph of Mary Mackey was taken by Irene Young.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 5, 2015
Good poet, good book. Read it last year.
July 24, 2022
This was one of those poetry books where I marked the truly excellent poems with a post-it and realized halfway through it would have been cheaper to mark the poems I DIDN'T love. Mary Mackey's poems about her early 20s in South America are mystical, lyrical, and visionary, without being purple or overwrought.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews