With tender attention and a keenly embodied curiosity, the poems in  I am the dead, who, you take care of me  are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead.  Following the poet’s recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is “a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat.”  By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, Anthony McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. “I want life/but for the living” he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these are works which ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.   McCann examines our attachment to the physical world and uses this to build a bridge to the metaphysical; in his undulating world, the physical self is a gift, one that gives us a hand to feel that pulse, a shape in all the noise. — Publishers Weekly McCann demonstrates that the truth surrounds us all; our best way of connecting with it is through compassion and love. With equal parts exuberance and dread, the speaker encourages us to “waste the whole day feeling these things.”  — Nate Pritts, Boston Review You might not “get” exactly what he is saying but you will feel what he is meaning. You will be moved by something pre-historic and radiant. Which is to say: you will be moved by this mysterious, lyric, ecstatic thing: poetry. — Matthew Dickman, Tin House Wave Books Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of four collections of poetry including  Thing Music  (Wave Books, 2014), I Heart Your Fate (Wave Books, 2011), and Moongarden (Wave Books, 2011). His book  Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff  (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a nonfiction prose work investigating the 2016 armed right-wing occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Anthony’s teaching, writing and research interests include 19th, 20th and 21st century North American Poetry; Political Theology; Political Ecology; Native American History; History of the Revolutionary, Constitutional and Reconstruction eras; Ecological History of the American West; Cultural Anthropology; Modern Latin American Poetry; and Anarchist thought and practice as it pertains to art-making, politics and other spheres of human endeavor. He lives in the Mojave Desert. Calamus     But I had to help the mountain to save it. It did not seem to hospital, or other human waste. See the sequence I’ve attached—who touching it   should dream. There was endless parking, a dribbled out orange stain, more waste on brave concrete where I sting beneath your tree.   But I’m inside someone who is me. Demographically I’d mean, where no one rides for free. It doesn’t matter if he’s dead. Or if he’s beautiful or pain; this is the enclosure   and it burns the mass inside. So that my yes-scored sentences are as practiced as the trees— because to amuse yourself this way is to be permanently real. But this is not for reading, or touching   going forth. Neither, if you will, for thrusting beneath clothes. Who touching you would sleep, and thus be carried off. Often there is nothing. No one but our love.