Praise for Devolution of the Nudes
From a buoyant imagination and a luxurant, spiky diction, Lynne McMahon’s poems brew a heady elixir. Under its spell, Elvis can be seen as Orpheus, or Virgil turn up as an evangelist. A baby’s pacifier or the state of California, anything and everything gets reinvented by this marvelous fabulist.
—J.D. McClatchy
These are poems of scope and daring: the traditional image of one line turns into the subversive emblem of another. Elvis and California. The sixties and sunglasses. These icons of one world are negotiated into the meanings of another. But what is most impressive is the yearning in every line to heal the false divisions between the public and the private, between the outer meaning and the inward perception.
—Eavan Boland