A collection that’s at once sardonic and “chronically wishful.”
Steve McOrmond's Reckon hones in on those fugitive moments when the parts of ourselves that have not been entirely subsumed by consumer capitalism escape their cages and come out to play—a photographer’s lifelong desire to collect snowflakes, an adolescent’s game of show-me-yours, the small, defiant act of letting a cellphone call go to voicemail. “The whole world has gone straight to voicemail,” McOrmond writes a line later.
Responding to a poem from Reckon that appeared on Poetry Daily, comedian Patton Oswalt tweeted a perceptive one-liner review: “Steve McOrmond’s new poem, ‘Pure Outrage,’ is really funny and, if you read it right, kind of scary.” Concerned with the sweep of history and the rush of the now, McOrmond demonstrates a knack for bringing the vast and amorphous down to human size, making it personal: “How gone? / Real gone. All our gift cards unredeemed.”
Shortlisted for the 2011 ReLit Award
One of the “Most Engaging Books of 2010” – Lemonhound
A “Top 10 Book of 2010” – Canadian Book Review
A “Critics' Pick 2010” – The Coast
A “Top-notch Book of 2010” – Salty Ink
Primer on the Hereafter
Winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize
“Steve McOrmond’s Primer on the Hereafter is full of memorable lines and images, wonderfully crafted and moving....“Clear-cut, as seen from above” is as beautiful a poem on an environmental theme as anyone has written, and “Finch Station” is a fine meditation on urban life.”
Maurice Mierau, Winnipeg Free Press
“I like to think of it as a book of nature poetry that is not always (or even often) about nature.”
Jacob Arthur Mooney, Eyewear
Lean Days
“McOrmond’s first book…reveals a voice of patented East Coast, I-ain’t-lyin’ plainness... The lyrics exude a “common touch,” but one informed by much reflection, and, most importantly, by carefully and frankly observed experience…Lean Days is phat wondering.”
George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald
“This is a book of longing. McOrmond may cover his longing in dark humour, but below there is a sensitivity that’s wrapped around the right metaphor, the perfect image.”
Michael DeBeyer, Atlantic Books Today