Temporary Kin

"Kathleen McClung is a master of the sonnet crown. In her skilled hands, that venerable form expands to encompass active shooter drills, smartphones, and Lyft drivers, as well as songbirds, the sea, and the moon. Even the structure of Temporary Kin-four sonnet crowns linked together by single villanelles-forms a circle, a daisy chain, a fifth and final crown. Like the speaker of one of her poems, McClung knows that there is an ancient magic to 'seasons, cycles, wheels that spin unseen / far longer than our brief mortality.'" Julie Kane, author of Jazz Funeral and Mothers of Ireland, co-editor of Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse.