Prof Becka McKay's The Little Book of No Consolation

Professor Becka McKay, the Director of Creative Writing at FAU, has published a second book of poems, The Little Book of No Consolation, with Barrow Street Press in May 2021.

‎Praise for The Little Book of No Consolation from the Barrow Street Press page for McKay's book:

“How strange it is to live in these bodies/and pretend we are not judged,” writes Becka McKay in her newest collection, The Little Book of No Consolation. McKay’s imagination takes us far away from our earthly bodies through dreamscapes of terror and possibilities. With a fanciful Dictionary of Misremembered English and mistranslated phrases as her guide, she reimagines Biblical figures, governments, and language’s very syntax. McKay spins her poems as though spinning plates, on a pole of syntax all her own, the gyroscopic effect dazzling.

—Denise Duhamel

The Little Book of No Consolation is obsessed with the constancy of human error and the smallness of individual experience—which is why it’s so fascinating how large this book is, how much McKay keeps discovering in the world “strapped to [her] eyes.” These poems are self-conscious and self-aware in the best sense, full of complex, startling observations about language, history, violence, God, sleep, and the animals “everywhere around us.” “How many kinds of disbelief can there be?” McKay asks—and yet this is a powerful, hard-won book of real and accumulating faith.

—Wayne Miller

McKay plays with the coordinates of English syntax with dazzling inventiveness. Every poem in this book takes the reader down a surprising new road, on a glorious pursuit of wisdom through our elusive relationship to language and meaning.

—Idra Novey

Read Julie Marie Wade's interview with Becka McKay, "Begin with Language: Talking with Becka Mara McKay" in The Rumpus, March 19th 2021.

Dean Horswell engages in conversation with Becka McKay, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Translation and Creative Writing, and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing, as they discuss her passion for the written word, what inspires her to write, and her process on how she constructs her own poetry. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.