Uttermost Paradise Place

by Laura McKee, Claudia Keelan (Introduction)

Winner of the prestigious American Poetry Review /Honickman First Book Prize, Laura McKee’s Uttermost Paradise Place achieves a shimmering transparency and surreal potency. While many of the poems are perceived via a persona, it is ultimately the personae of perception that proscribe the pure pleasure of reading. Committed to the eye and the ear, Uttermost Paradise Place sounds a music of syllables, repetitions, recurrences, and duration. As judge Claudia Keelan writes in her introduction, “Laura McKee creates a poetics of call and response, but not in the traditional sense, as in poet to reader, chorus leader to singers, etc. These poems call to each other, syllable by syllable, and they are so pleased with their circuitry of sound and sense that readers—if they just give themselves away to the pleasure of being exactly nowhere but in the unscripted place all authentic poetry provides—will experience the paradise the book proposes.” I found a flight suit in the dryer this weekend.
The zippers were hotter than hell when it first emerged
As if it were the machine’s inaugural attempt at creation.
When it fit perfectly, I realized it was perfect.
Suit, I salute you. You have changed my questions.
From now on, “What will I wear?” I will wear the suit.
Never again, “What will I wear? ” Those pants.
But what shirt? Laura McKee earned her MFA from the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle and works at the Cornish College of the Arts.

Genres: Poetry

50 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Elizabeth]

Uttermost Paradise Place, like all good language poetry, makes use of every word on every line in order to extract the reader's mental quickness and inner ear. Short poems, long poems, alike will make you reconsider where the poem started and where it left you at the end - always aware that every "motion" is an interior one, an abstracted conclusion, a surrealistic surprise.

The closest prose analogies I can come to are the construction of Virginia Woolf's sentences, which surprised her peers and modern-day writers with the ability to hang so much mental motion on lengthy gramattical structures, and oddly enough Terry Prachett's L-space, where words take on more heft and warp the nature of the universe. Each word in a McKee poem insists on its own existence, and when it locks into the whole of the line, creates a different perceptual slice of what we think is going on.

For example, take "The Last Wall is a Strange Cool Puzzle" where she writes:

"...Sherlock, hold the vial/ thought up to the light, not the social shattering easy sound/next door and then laughter,not fingerprints or happiness but love/ of love, absence, inscrutable center of a stone..."

We begin thinking of a physical wall,and she tells us about the mason. But by the time you read the lines above, your idea of what the wall is - and where the love of love contains, is or is going - continues to shift. Interestingly, hell as a concept or a place of redemption is a continuous subtext of this book, belied by its (euphemistic?) title that implies the complete opposite.

If you like language, puzzles, nuances, metaphoric shifts, and perception madly walking, then you will like Uttermost Paradise Place.

[Izzy Moore]

Lines that are beautiful and deep! I enjoyed reading Laura’s word immensely!

[Erin Malone]

I loved this book and want to read it again in order to clearly express my thoughts about it. For now: The persona here is wise, funny and tender; the landscape, slanted in that where am I, dream/jet lag sort of way. These kinds of poems make me love their language: lovely, startling. The hardcover edition of this book is exquisite.