Born in rural Texas in 1986, the oldest of seven children, and once described by Craig Teicher of NPR as “the poster-girl for a new generation of poets,” McClure revises the nuances of class, race, and clashing identities in a polyvocal style that flows out of her experience as an ambiguous academic turned ambivalent corporate creative; a firsthand witness to rural poverty and its colonial origins; a white Chicana with a vexed position in American society; an educated urbanite with a deep connection to the folklore and wisdom of her agricultural-worker ancestors. The Gone Thing upends traditions of pastoral poetry and bucolic subject matter, using the allegory of land stewardship to sketch a jagged narrative of personal and collective loss. Sometimes self-conscious, often unequivocally sincere, the lines that compose these poems lull and jolt their way across different landscapes: barren political realms, the author’s own fertile body, a suffering natural world, and an amnesiac society, in which the speaker works, shops, marvels, suffers, and doesn’t die.

Finely crafted but never overworked. This book is everything poetry should be: fresh, alive, surprising; explosive, daring, brutal; honest, searching, hungry.
—Ethan Stebbins