On Jill McDonough

Jill McDonough's poems are lyrical founts of energy and insight and humor and empathy. She's a daring poet, formally sophisticated yet pushing the boundaries of form at every turn. In the four or five years I've known her poems, their subjects have dazzled me: a bumptious American girl teaching in Japan and loving the language, a gorgeous exotic dancer in a local club, really tender love poems, really tough (what else?) Catallus translations, and a long sonnet sequence about murderers who've been executed throughout American history. I want to follow the trajectory of McDonough's work, its twists and turns—it will never fail to be interesting.

—Gail Mazur, author of four books of poems, most recently They Can't Take That Away from Me. She is Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College.