Irene McKinney is the author of five books of poetry: The Girl with a Stone in Her Lap; Quick Fire and Slow Fire; Six O'Clock Mine Report; Vivid Companion;
and Unthinkable: Selected Poems. She edited the anthology Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and two West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowships in poetry and has held fellowships at MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Blue Mountain Center.
McKinney was appointed Poet Laureate of West Virginia in 1994. She has been writer-in-residence at Western Washington University at Bellingham, the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, University of California at Santa Cruz and Hamilton College. She was appointed Thornton Writer in Residence at Lynchburg College for 2010. She is Professor Emerita of West Virginia Wesleyan College.
McKinney is an occasional commentator on National Public Radio. Her poems have been featured five times in Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac and on Verse Daily. Recent poems have been published in American Voice, Artful Dodge, Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Kenyon Review, Confluence, South Dakota Review, Kestrel, Poetry Northwest, Clackamas Literary Review, Georgia Review, Washington Square, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review and other journals.---------
NAMED
Irene, eternal con.
And Irene, doer of deeds.
Groaner, false widow.
Giver of breath, Irene,
Equivocator, judge of nothing.
Irene, waker in the night.
Silent partner. She Who.
Fragrant bather, gentle bitch.
Irene, maternal watcher. Irene,
archer and dissembler, the named
and namer. Irene, devourer
of chicken and cake.
Irene, where the West Wind blows.
Strange-in-Virginia-Irene, bender
of wills. Shattered and pieced
together, rejoined and spoken.
Irene, the long slide down
to nothing, the fragile
shell of love. Breaker,
prancer, beginner.
She who bows down
and loves it. Irene.
A label, and a song.
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Photos by R.J. Gibson & Doug Van Gundy