Travelers with No Ticket Home

Poetry. In this stunning new collection, Mackey offers her readers fifty-eight intensely lyrical poems written with the same skill and passion that made her previous collection Sugar Zone winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Complex yet entirely accessible, the poems in TRAVELERS WITH NO TICKET HOME form a visionary meditation on nature, childhood, the destruction of the rainforest of the Amazon, and the real and psychological landscape of travel. Taking us from a small farm in Western Kentucky to the jungles of Brazil, Mackey touches on the broader human feelings of wonder, displacement, grief, love, and love’s endless complications. Here too, for the first time, readers will find Mackey’s complete Kama Sutra of Kindness, a series of seven love poems written over the last thirty years.

Mary Mackey joins other visionary poets of depaysement… recovering a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forro, and death. The lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home.–Dennis Nurske