A Long Time to Be Gone (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

Poems that discover enduring pleasures in the details of our everyday lives.

Michael McFee’s twelfth collection of poetry explores challenging subjects—the realities of aging, the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the disappearance of Appalachian culture—in poems that discover enduring pleasures in the details of our everyday lives. It also includes vivid, lively, and imaginative responses to quirky words, a jazz standard, family members, celebrities, and several paintings. As one reader has said, “In his poems filled with quotidian experience, the objects of the material world shimmer with consequence: they are alight with attention—McFee’s, and through his art, ours. He is one of our best poets.”