Creature, Wing, Heart, Machine

2022 Zone 3 Press First Book Award in Poetry Winning Collection.

In CREATURE, WING, HEART, MACHINE, through a series of narrative and lyric poems, we follow the central protagonist, Alva, as she grapples with heartbreak, desire, mortality and her search for love in a world where both Nature and relationships are increasingly shaped by technology. From the desert to MRI machines to online dating to the Large Hadron Collider to the flora and fauna of natural and imagined worlds, Alva seeks meaning and the keys to human connection.

"There is precision, awe, and ache coursing throughout CREATURE, WING, HEART, MACHINE. This is a book 'made of blood and muscle.' These stunning poems are reminiscent of what I love most about the heart and heat of poetry, peppered with a knack for fantastic figurative language, and a keen specificity in the soupy, surreal loss of love and longing. I am grateful to have read this book brimming with various desires (both with levity and grief) …. McKee speaks through the mask of the character Alva, blurring the first and third person, when she writes, 'Alva is and is not me.' Sometimes we need the architecture of another voice to find our own. I felt seen and understood by the way Alva drank in the whole strange world with beauty and sorrow, reminding us that 'we're all machines hungry to be opened.'"--Tiana Clark, author of I Can't Talk about the Trees without the Blood

"In powerful persona books like CREATURE, WING, HEART, MACHINE, you get to know an author's alter ego as a character whose life is pure, vivid testimony. But what makes these particular poems so memorable is how McKee simultaneously investigates the question of being Alva on the page, and how sharply she addresses the need to create a second self while confronting heartbreak. Sensual, cinematic, and alternately fierce and hopeful, CREATURE, WING, HEART, MACHINE is a moving chronicle of what it takes to transform."--Maria Hummel, author of House and Fire

"In the frank confiding of this delicious debut, CREATURE, WING, HEART, MACHINE, McKee does a lot of things, and introducing us to Alva is my favorite. Do you know who Alva is? I am pretty sure she is us…. There is so much tenderness here--for all of us, for 'how you're not alone, how we're all machines hungry to be opened.' But also for 'every beloved thing that kneels and drinks.' 'How could her life/be different?' she wonders, looking with wonder at the wonder of the world. Walking with her through these poems, their humor and sweetness, their wry awareness of their own predicaments, is like having a funny best friend in the romantic comedy of our lives. We are lucky to be here with Alva, and with McKee."--Jill McDonough, author of American Treasure

Poetry. Women's Studies.

L.S. McKee is a writer and educator. Her work has appeared in Narrative, The Massachusetts Review, Best New Poets, Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford. She has taught writing at several universities, including MIT, and is now Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Georgia. Originally from East Tennessee, she lives in Athens, Georgia with her family.