PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Marcia B. Loughran won Mrs. Mott's prestigious haiku prize in fifth grade at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., and resumed her writing career thirty years later. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2013. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Verdad, Spoon River Poetry Review and elsewhere. Marcia's first chapbook, Still Life with Weather, won the 2016 WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Prize. She reads her work in various bars, bookstores and black-box theaters in New York City and the Catskills and is a regular at the Irish American Writers and Artists' Salons. Marcia is a nurse practitioner and lives in Queens, NY.
To say I'm a fan of Marcia B. Loughran's poetry is to put it mildly. Songs From the Back-in-the-Back is her third chapbook, and like the other two-Still Life with Weather and My Mother Never Died Before and Other Poems, the poems rock. Loughran's voice captures moments and scenes with a directness that brings the reader into the experience, whether you're in the back-in-the-back on a long family car ride, or you're taken back in time with her parents to Baghdad, 1963, when their lives together are just beginning. Loughran manages to write poetry that is funny, poignant, accessible-and inimitable.-Nancy Jainchill, psychologist, author of Thai-Thai's Very Curly Tail I have known Marcia B. Loughran's father since the Saturday matinee movie in the suburbs was a Western followed by an Abbott and Costello comedy, and I have been Uncle Mac to her and her siblings all of their lives. I am, thus, not an unprejudiced reader of her poetry, but I admire her gentle but unblinking accounts of a family's foibles and inalterably deep affection. She reports her father's endless recollections of movies and of our misspent youth and also his endless loving loyalty, whether to a supposed grandchild in need or for a departed friend. Riding in the back-in-the back of a station wagon becomes a family tale akin to Mitt Romney's dog-on-the-roof. A weekend that Marcia spent caring for my hospitalized, dying wife becomes a reflection on urban displacement, Hopper-like visions in windows across an urban void, and puppy-love. The same wry, loving, knowing perspective informs her rumination on extended family experiences. Marcia B. Loughran's penetrating truthfulness combines with her gentle and forgiving humor to create a healing and uplifting vision of her family and her world. We need more moments like these in our ruptured time.-Milton McC. Gatch, author of Till the Break of Day Philip Gatch and Some Descendants Through Three Centuries I don't often read poetry because I often feel that the poet is selfishly trying to confuse me. I read Marcia B. Loughran's poetry. With her generous and accessible words and images, she touches those places in me that spark both memory and imagination. Songs from the Back-in-the Back is a gorgeous collection of Marcia's best family tidbits.-Franny Forsman, Las Vegas lawyer and author
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