Skip to main content

Jill McDonough

Visiting Poet

Jill McDonough

Proclaimed a “gifted and courageous poet” by Eavan Boland, Jill McDonough is a brilliant and lively presence on the poetry scene. Her first book, Habeas Corpus, offers a sequence of fifty sonnets, each one about a person executed in the United States between 1605 and 2005. She brilliantly illuminates what is known, while leaving room for all that is unknowable about these stories and characters, building what Boland calls “a powerful, relentless music,” the true subject of which “is not death but human survival—in memory, language and suffering.”

In Habeus Corpus, McDonough rises to the double challenge of mastering the sonnet form and breathing life into these many disparate voices, exposing secret landscapes of America’s past with confidence, clear-minded precision, and deep empathy. Poetry London called the book “part death count, part historical panorama, part impassioned plea, but for the most part a collection of striking, absorbing poetry,” and The Threepenny Review claimed that its power, “as a work of literature and as a political act, is both cumulative and chastening.”

In 2012, a mere four years later, McDonough released both the chapbook “Oh, James,” a series of poems based on the James Bond films, and the full-length collection Where You Live, which features the Fung Wah bus, “Breasts like Martinis,” and Hildegard Von Bïngen. Of Where You Live, the poet Major Jackson writes that “beneath the poker-faced humor and cosmopolitan wit. . . is a profligate mind, urgently intoning her inexhaustible humanity and our not-too-perfect existence.”

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, McDonough has lived in North Carolina, Maine, and Japan, as well as San Francisco, Boston, and New York. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and Stanford’s Stegner program. For thirteen years, she taught incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program. Currently, she teaches poetry at UMass-Boston and directs 24PearlStreet, the online writing program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Select Poems

Boston, Massachusetts

A boatswain on an English slaver, he threw

his masters overboard, was caught within

the week. In prison, he refused all food

and drink, except for rum. Refused to forgive

his enemies, or say he had: No. I

won’t dy with a lye in my mouth
. He swore all the way

to the scaffold, wished the Goddamned ship would fly

away with devils, cursed himself, and the day

he was born, and her that bare him
, and heaven, the God

who judged him, the man who turned him in. They prayed

for his repentance. He offered scorn, then awed

the crowd with advice to the hangman on his trade:

he tied the knot himself. They let him sway,

then tarred his body, and gibbeted him in the bay.

The night we got bashed we told Rusty how
they drove up, yelled QUEER, threw a hot dog, sped off.
 
Rusty: Now, is that gaybashing? Or
are they just calling you queer? Good point.

Josey pitied the fools: who buys a perfectly good pack of wieners

and drives around San Francisco chucking them at gays?

And who speeds off? Missing the point, the pleasure of the bash?
Dear bashers, you should have seen the hot dog hit my neck,

the scarf Josey sewed from antique silk kimonos: so gay. You

missed laughing at us, us confused, your raw hot dog on the ground.

Josey and Rusty and Bob make fun of the gaybashers, and I
wash my scarf in the sink. I use Woolite. We worry

about insurance, interest rates. Not hot dogs thrown from F-150s,

homophobic freaks. After the bashing, we used the ATM

in the sex shop next to Annie’s Social Club, smiled at the kind
owner, his handlebar mustache. Astrud Gilberto sang tall and tan
 
and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema… and the dildos
gleamed from the walls, a hundred cheerful colors. In San Francisco
 
it rains hot dogs, pity-the-fool. Ass-sized penguins, cock after cock in
azure acrylic, butterscotch glass, anyone’s flesh-tone, chrome.

Everybody writes poems

about the Fung Wah.  All my students.  Mine’s

about the line outside the ticket kiosk in Chinatown, and how

the little Chinese lady

who yells SIX O’CLOCK!  and runs

around the corner with a straggly crowd of would-be riders

had already run.

I walked around trying to remember where

was Travel Pack, where the Lucky Star.  I found

a shop that sold Lucky Star

tickets, also lottery tickets

and bubble tea.  This little Chinese lady started pointing

toward various crowds on the sidewalk

that might be the line for my bus.

I shook my head. She grumbled and took off

her apron and came out from behind the counter,

came outside with me.  I thanked her, and she said 

No English.  So I smiled and gave her a big

thumbs up, which made her laugh and say thank you.  

Thank you, I said.  Then she tried to leave me

in the Fung Wah line, but I got some Fung Wah

riders to show her their tickets.  Not Lucky Star,

Fung Wah.  She winced and said Fung Wah! 

as if it were a curse.  She cursed Fung Wah

and headed off across the street toward another

potential Lucky Star line.  It was a busy street, and a car

swerved to miss her, honked.  So I took her hand.

She was wearing a coat that was too long for her, so I only felt half

of her hand.  My mother’s age, the size I was

when I was nine.  I took her hand

and she looked up at me and smiled again, and said Thank you!

Thank YOU!
 I said, and we laughed and

walked across the street holding hands.

Across the street we could see a line of people holding

the pink tickets that meant

we were in the right place, the line of Lucky

Star riders, but we liked walking and holding hands, liked

the winter twilight, the relative silence.  I think I loved

her.  She took me to the head of the line.  No one

complained: perhaps the other riders thought

if we were holding hands, then I must be

retarded.  At last she turned me

toward her, and we held each other’s hands and said

good-bye: Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you!
  On the bus, I sit

in the best seat, up front, and read Little Dorrit

and fall asleep while the driver

whistles, sometimes singing in Chinese.

About Jill

Personal Website
Poetry Center Reading Dates: April 2013