Michael McFee, A Long Time To Be Gone

Poems that discover enduring pleasures in the details of our everyday lives.

Michael McFee’s twelfth collection of poetry explores challenging subjects—the realities of aging, the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the disappearance of Appalachian culture—in poems that discover enduring pleasures in the details of our everyday lives. It also includes vivid, lively, and imaginative responses to quirky words, a jazz standard, family members, celebrities, and several paintings. As one reader has said, “In his poems filled with quotidian experience, the objects of the material world shimmer with consequence: they are alight with attention—McFee’s, and through his art, ours. He is one of our best poets.”

A native of Asheville, North Carolina, and resident of Durham, Michael McFee is the Doris Betts Term Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he teaches in the Creative Writing Program. He is the author or editor of sixteen previous books, most recently We Were Once Here and Appointed Rounds: Essays.