It Looks Like a Man

Heather McHugh’s new collection of poems joins her fourteen previously published volumes of poetry, essays, and translation (one a Pulitzer Prize finalist and another designated a Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly). With her 2010 MacArthur Fellowship she funded a program of restorative getaways for unpaid family caregivers. An abiding theme throughout McHugh’s work has been the essential muteness of individual experience as it is remarked from greatening distances of time, space, or feeling. In view of that gulf between experience and expression, the words of characters here suggest the many ways a human being can be said to look.

Praise for McHugh’s poetry “Her writing is so alert to itself, so alert to language, it’s like watching a dancer on a mirrored floor, stepping on her steps. She’s practically playing with her words as she writes them down.” -Robert Hass, Washington Post Book World

“….McHugh remains one of our most important and unusual poets….”-Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“If McHugh is serious, she’s anything but grim; with all her punning, bantering, and mock scolding of herself . . . she brightens the shadowy corners of her world with verbal pyrotechnics.”-The New York Times Book Review

“McHugh is known as a challenging wordsmith, but, as this collection reveals, she is also a compassionate eyewitness . . . Her lines are animated but serious, and though they accelerate quickly, meaning and humor can be found in a single word.”-The New Yorker

“Her poems are open, resilient, invisibly twisted: part safety net, part trampoline.”-The Village Voice Literary Supplement

“In poems that are rich with wordplay―puns, rhymes, syntactical twists―Heather McHugh reveals the complex layers of meaning that individual words or phrases contain. The result is intellectually challenging, yet emotionally engaging verse that balances gravity with humor.“―The MacArthur Foundation

Author Biography

Heather McHugh is an American poet notable for Dangers, To the Quick, Eyeshot and Muddy Matterhorn. McHugh was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in the US and a Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.