poetry In SUGAR ZONE, Mary Mackey takes you on a fascinating journey to . . . a place of desperate actuality . . . joining other visionary poets of dépaysement- Henri Michaux in Asia, John Ash in Anatolia, Sharon Doubiago in Peru, Lorca in Manhattan. Mackey really seems to recover a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forro, and death. Please read Cold Snap; who but Mackey could have written it? SUGAR ZONE authoritatively creates a language and a culture; but the lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home. --Dennis Nurske Mary Mackey's new collection SUGAR ZONE is the culmination of many trips to Brazil. Most poems crackle with powerful and lush imagery; others are stark and draw their strength of the wisdom of the saying. These are death haunted poems but full of the vitality of the jungle, the favelas of Rio, the Amazon itself. --Marge Piercy Mackey's crisp-edged perceptions are set down in these poems with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly unflinching eye. --Jane Hirshfield Mary Mackey received a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The University of Michigan. Her published works include six collections of poetry, including BREAKING THE FEVER (Marsh Hawk Press, 2006) and SUGAR ZONE (Marsh Hawk Press, 2011) and twelve novels. Her poems have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Dennis Nurkse, Ron Hansen, Dennis Schmitz, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Three times Garrison Keillor has featured her poetry on his program The Writer's Almanac . Mackey's work has been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. She is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Sacramento. For the last twenty years she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband, Angus Wright, who writes about land reform and environmental issues. At present she is working on a series of poems inspired by the works of Brazilian poets and novelists. Combining Portuguese and English, she creates poems that use Portuguese as incantation to evoke the lyrical space that lies at the conjunction between Portuguese and English.