Martha McCollough: I Woke Up for This

Martha McCollough's I Woke Up for This begins with a cycle of short poems meditating on the Angel of History, followed by poems embodying perspectives shifting from the internal: “once my body / carried me here and there / like a good horse” to the cosmic: “one day you realize / nature is merciless / and the gods are awful”. Through shifting, layered points of view, grim to hopeful to darkly hilarious, the poems consider solitude, black mold, bad paintings, and “the long catastrophe through which we somehow live”.

Martha McCollough is the author of Trash Witch (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2025), Wolf Hat Iron Shoes (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022) and the chapbook Grandmother Mountain (Blue Lyra, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Pleiades, The Boiler, and Bear Review, among others. Originally from Detroit, she lives in Amherst, MA.