Rennie McQuilkin

Afterword Rennie McQuilkin

After completing several writing projects, Connecticut Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin was ready to "sell his camel," as the Bedouins say. But poems continued to rise up, at first sporadically and then in March of 2017, more insistently, perhaps incited by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which he founded, and a "strangely sanguine sense of mortality." From then until late in the year, he wrote a poem per day, often late at night when he fell into "bemused mullings of the day's events." Afterword is a sampling of those poems, going back to early 2016. Written in down-to-earth language whose apparent simplicity belies rich undercurrents of meaning, the poems show that the usual can be most unusual; they encourage readers to look twice at what may seem like minor occurrences in their own lives. About the book, Richard Blanco (Presidential Inauguration poet for Barack Obama) writes, "As the title so aptly evokes, the poems in Afterword read like tender after-thoughts on those seemingly ordinary encounters of our lives which are rendered into the extraordinary through McQuilkin's keen eye and exquisitely shaped language."