The Manageable Cold: Poems

Displaying a confidence and maturity rarely found in a first collection, Timothy McBride’s The Manageable Cold is a record of a sustained encounter with some of the most vital aspects of a life–childhood, language, romance, the body, the natural world. The Manageable Cold showcases McBride’s mastery of a wide range of forms and subjects. Whether his attention is focused on boxing, jazz, or contranyms, McBride breathes new life into the sonnet and the villanelle and handles blank verse with the utmost ease. The combination of traditional techniques and McBride’s thoroughly modern sensibility gives rise to poems that seem simultaneously utterly fresh and immemorially old, calling to mind the rigorously embodied works of Robert Frost, Howard Nemerov, and Mary Oliver. Timothy McBride is a science writer and editor. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Seneca Review, and Poetry Northwest, among other publications. The Manageable Cold is his first book of poetry.