Python With A Dog Inside It [TRADE PAPER ]

Set on the marshlands of working-class southern New Jersey,Python with a Dog Inside It, the debut collection by poet Max McDonough, traces the tangled story of two gay brothers as they endeavor to survive their mother's erratic and escalating violence. They retreat to the privacy of suburban woods and swamps, a world of their own glimmering with ruin and possibility: abandoned furniture, mud-caked jewelry, a time machine. The poems in this collection occupy, as Judith Herman describes it, the space between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud. Ultimately,Python with a Dog Inside Itis not only a story of survival, but one of redemption. By proclaiming the events of a particular, harrowing childhood, McDonough invents a future beyond it, one marked by radical openness, hope's flame brighter for the darkness.This collection gets into your bones and stays. Rooted in marsh and mud, these poems keen with a somber beauty. Here is an unflinching family portrait, a tender collage of boyhood, and ultimately an ode to what home makes of us, all tuned to the particular frequency of McDonough’s potent lyric. This is a gifted young poet and a beautiful debut. –Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
The poems in Python with a Dog Inside It pulse with barbed beauty and fraught intimacy. By turns earthy and tender, brutal and unflinching, McDonough illuminates the hidden truths of both “suburban woods” and domestic home like a flashlight throwing darkness into relief. Tracing the legacy of family and the ghosts of what we witness, these poems ask, “does violence live in the genes, / their story telling itself / in the dormant voice / of a seed”? They will make you confront what latent history swirls in your own veins, daring to be repeated, rebuked, remade. – Alina Grabowski, author of Women and Children First
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