ABOUT THE BOOK

In her signature economical style, Jo McDougall invites readers into the small towns of the rural South and Midwest and the dramas of their inhabitants. Through her spare, stoic, and at times spectral form of storytelling, she depicts lives limited by privation yet buoyed by dreams. Grief, resignation, awe, death, and joy abide in her work. McDougall is wed to realism, but obliged to invent; it’s these inventions that lend her portraits a singular sensitivity and clear-eyed register.

"Incandescent, adj. (1) glowing, luminous with intense heat; (2) strikingly bright, radiant, clear; (3) marked by brilliance of expression; (4) ardent or burning; (5) of, relating to, or being light itself produced by incandescence. Shares roots with candid and candle." 

—Jesse Nathan

REVIEWS

Terseness and Opulence: In Jo McDougall, Kansas Meets Arkansas, by Athena Kildegaard (Bloom)

The Arrogance of Dirt, A Review of Jo McDougall’s The Undiscovered Room and In the Home of the Famous Dead, by CL Bledsoe (Arkansas Review)

ABOUT JO MCDOUGALL

Jo McDougall is the author of Daddy’s Money: A Memoir of Farm and Family, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2011. Her collected poems, In the Home of the Famous Dead (2015), also published with The University of Arkansas Press, gathers together her previous seven collections of poetry. She lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

96 pages | 5.5 x 7.5 in.
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-55-0 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-56-7 (hardcover)