Kelly McQuain has published fiction, poetry and essays in such places as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Pinch, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Assaracus. He's also illustrated comics and book covers. He teaches writing in Philadelphia.
–Saturday 3/11/2023 11 pm – Noon — Signing at Kestrel: A Journal of Literature & Art, table #1300.
–And I will be reading Friday at 7:00 at Underbelly in Seattle, free and open to all. The reading will start at 7:30 or so and I will read after 8:00. “We’re the Flownover” at Underbelly at 8:00 Friday. 119 1st Ave S, Seattle, WA, United States, Washington Duration: 2 hr Join us for a poetry and prose reading featuring new work from Trio House Press, Gold Wake Press, Minnesota Historical Society Press, the South Dakota Review, and Texas Review Press!
From Trio House Press: David Groff Matt Mauch Jen Manthey From Gold Wake Press: Laura Bandy From MN Historical Society Press: Lynette Reini-Grandell From South Dakota Review: Lee Ann Roripaugh Jan Beatty See less From Texas Review Press: Kelly McQuain
Kelly McQuain’s Debut Poetry Collection, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, out now from Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press
In questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain’s poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain’s work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create—all the while shining with wonder and resolve. Several of the poems won contests, including the Bloom chapbook prize, the Glitter Bomb Award, Best New Poets 2000and more. (From the publisher, Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press)
Book Cover: Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers by Kelly McQuain
Buy the Book: Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Texas Review Press is part of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium, so books can be ordered through the press at Texas A&M University Press.
Scrape the Velvet From Your Antlers. Kelly McQuain. 978-1-68003-332-8 Paperback, Pub Date: 02/15/2023
Direct Media Inquiries & Review Copy Requests to: Texas Review Press (TRP, Publisher), P.O. Box 2146, Huntsville, TX 77341-2146 ~ * ~ Email trp@shsu.edu ~ * ~ Phone 936-294-1992
You can also contact Kelly McQuain directly at the links at the end of this announcement.
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“Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers”
As you take the hill, the hill takes you— raking you and your siblings into a grassy sway of beetles and spiders moving, and the day’s hot ricochet of blue bottle flies and bees gone crazy in their looping. Your brother and sister run to catch the horizon. You wade slowly through the lashing, alive with combustion, eager for bursting…
Excerpt from the title poem, originally published in Kestrel.
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Advance Praise from Writers
Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers the debut poetry collection by Kelly McQuain
Winner of Texas Review Press’s Southern Breakthrough Award
Kelly McQuain’s language—exact, thrilling, exquisite—isolates the contradictions inherent in family, in our society. Queerness, here, is an ‘ache of wanting’ but also bewilderment, dangerous, messy, curious, and, finally, hard-won love—a bond to a man who brings home strawberries. Too often, in our era of easy oversharing and spectacle, we scroll past human utterances. But McQuain’s confessional poems stopped me in my tracks, brought me closer to what divides us, to what tethers us.”
–Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
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Kelly McQuain has written a book of poems both poignant and mesmerizing. The complexities of family relationships are examined here with a no-holds-barred frankness that makes it impossible not to recall the nearly overwhelming power of emotional dissonance in our own early lives. There is also an intricate look at how a burgeoning sexuality can further complicate entry into the world as we know it. However, the texture of these poems is wonderfully rich; McQuain’s poems have a cinematic quality that is hard to resist. I quickly found myself caught in the current of Scrape The Velvet from Your Antlers, feeling compelled to read just one more poem and then another and then just one more.
–Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto.
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“[H]ow easily the things we do go awry— / what can we // expect of truth / when we don’t dig for proof / or plumb its depth?” And digging for truth is what Kelly McQuain does in poem after beautiful poem in his moving collection Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers. The speaker in this book knows deeply the language of rural landscape and lives in the space where landscape and body merge. McQuain also understands grief and leaving, following the “[s]omething [that] calls you somewhere else.” These are generous poems, ravenous to love a broken world. Whether McQuain’s speaker is at a circuit party or trying to talk down a man who wants to jump from a bridge, there is a through line of tenderness, a lived-in melancholy. His longing becomes our longing.
–Aaron Smith, author of The Book of Daniel
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McQuain’s poems stun with tenderness and revelation. The poet sings of burlap and corn silk, wolves and drag-queens, and the heart shuddering like unripe fruit against Dolly’s billowy chest as he confronts the accumulation and loss of this life while searching for a soft place to land.
—Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread
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Kelly McQuain’s wholehearted and powerful poems lead us into the valley of his making, with tales of a hardscrabble rural childhood and his “boyhood’s sweet undoing,” giving witness to a queer boy at once at home and in inner exile. But with all his tough-love exploration of the past, McQuain blazes his way to a new home, in a keenly rendered Philadelphia—and into the heady, trying truths of romantic love: “I’d drink your heart right now if I could,” he writes, “even if we were silver/and red/and made of tin.” Equally at ease in evocative narrative poems and the vivid, painterly lyric, McQuain invites us to set aside “the weight of this life undermined” and join him to “dream of constellations not yet named,/of ghosts, in reprieve, sent ascatter.”
–David Groff, author of Clay
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Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers travels wondrously over verdant hills and down bustling city streets to find what matters: the gorgeous love, the all-consuming desire, the joy of human touch. This collection sings, pounds, and shouts. McQuain’s keen eye and sharp words command us to stop and see. Scrape the Velvet is a treat of a book, rendered by a man at the peak of his craft.
–Jonathan Corcoran, author of The Rope Swing
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In Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, maturity is shown as a toughening process, a paring away of uncertainty. In the West Virginia of his childhood, McQuain finds himself a young gay man struggling against an alien and discriminatory culture. In elegant poems, so much of a place and time, he goes from the boy eager to please an exacting father intent on building a house, to the Good Samaritan in the big city where he has landed, stopping in traffic to talk a would-be suicide down from a bridge. In lyrical lines that stretch out where they need to, never losing momentum, he blends a Keatsian sweetness with the street smarts of a Frank O’Hara. “As you take the hill, the hill takes you.” It is “stubbled with stubborn flowers,” the deer he views, “a blister/ of orange-red and velvet need.” And in the lush final poem, the simple feast of Italian ices from a South Philly vendor that the poet shares in bed with his lover one hot summer night he rightly names “this moment/ a victory.”
—Elaine Terranvova, author of The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir and Damages.
Kelly McQuain is the author of Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers (2023), a poetry collection chosen by Texas Review Press for the Southern Breakthrough Award. He has also authored two chapbooks, Velvet Rodeo, which won the Bloom chapbook poetry prize, and Antlers, chosen for the Editors Series at Seven Kitchens Press. His prose, poetry and illustrations have appeared in The Pinch, Best American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Spunk, Assaracus, Kestrel, and Cleaver, as well as such anthologies as: Best New Poets 2020; Men on Men; Drawn to Marvel; LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia; Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia; The Queer South; Rabbit Ears: TV Poems; and Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology. Other honors include poet Dorianne Laux’s selection of his poem, “Ruby on Fire”, for Limp Wrist Magazine’s annual Glitter Bomb Award, two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, and selection as a Tennessee Williams Scholar by the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop. As a visual artist, McQuain has won prizes from the Barnes Foundation and Philadelphia’s William Way LGBTQ Center, and his series of writer portraits appear as cover illustrations on Fjords Review. As an Assoc. Professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia, McQuain has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the East-West Center of Hawaii, which led to his selection for a field study and research trip sponsored by the Freeman Foundation and the Chinese Ministry of Education, which took him from Beijing to Shanghai and many points in between. His travels greatly influence his painting and writing, and he takes joy in sharing his love of the arts with his students.
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“We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Some good news! My first full-length poetry collection has been accepted by Texas Review Press (see the first link in the comments). My book was chosen for their Southern Breakthrough Series, a contest that seeks new works from a different southern state each year. My collection, titled Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, was chosen to represent WV, my home state. The title refers to something bucks do to harden their antlers in anticipation of the fighting come mating season. This is my first full-length book, a longstanding dream of mine! The book will debut in February 2023. My thanks to TRP, all the editors who first published these poems, and especially the editors at Kestrel, A Journal of Literature and Art, where the title poem first appeared (thanks Donna Long, @Elizabeth Savage, Suzanne Heagy). #poetry
I am long overdue in sharing this good writers news: My chapbook, Antlers, was selected by #SevenKitchensPress for their Editor’s Series. Much thanks to editor Ron Mohring for his hard work on this project. The chapbooks are painstakingly crafted and stitched by hand in a very limited quantity. More writing news is coming soon! Details on how to order the chapbook are here: https://sevenkitchenspress.com/2022/01/29/kelly-mcquain-antler-editors-series/
I was over the moon this April to learn I won the first annual Glitter Bomb Award from poet Dustin Brookshire’s Limp Wrist magazine. The contest was judged by Pulitzer Prize Finalist Dorianne Laux, whom I greatly admire, and it came with a $500 prize. Issue 3 is live now with three of my poems, including the award-winning “Ruby on Fire”. Click here to read it.
Just in time for Christmas! Bumble is happy that I have a poem in the newly arrived Best New Poets 2020 anthology! Special thanks to editor Brian Teare and series editor Jeb Livingood for having faith in my poem, “The Moon in Drag”.
Two of my paintings are featured in a new show at the Philadelphia National Liberty Museum. See the details below.
On view October 16, 2020 – February 13, 2021 10:00AM – 7:00PM (Special priority access for seniors and immunocompromised individuals from 10-11AM each day.) Click here for location and details.
Diverse Voices. One City.
How do we define “liberty”? What does it mean to be “free”? These are questions and concepts that we have grappled with at the National Liberty Museum for more than 20 years and ones we posed to a group of talented artists from across Philadelphia in our newest exhibition, Philly’s Freedom.
Through more than 75 works of art, Philly’s Freedom invites you on a journey to explore what freedom means to 50+ artists as they use stories, reflections, and images to inspire us to see freedom and liberty as an ongoing human quest we all share.
This month I had some wonderful poetry news. A poem of mine, “The Moon in Drag” will appear in the anthology series Best New Poets 2020. I’ll post more about it when the anthology comes out. Also, another poem, “The Walk” was recently featured in the online journal Trampset. You can read it here.
About the Artist: Kelly McQuain grew up surrounded by the lush mountains of West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. This proved a rich source of inspiration for his artistic imagination and his development of a style influenced by folk art and laden with evocative symbolism.
These works in watercolor and acrylic reflect the artist’s practice of layering paint in different ways. “Whether on canvas or paper, I generally start a work with abstract layers of color laid down in soft washes,” McQuain states. “Then I tease out different forms based on how the washes speak to me. I try to let old layers peek through as I add new ones, conjuring figures and tiny details. It’s not my goal to transcribe nature in a realistic way. Rather, I try to find the essence of a thing and use dreamlike imagery to convey its spirit.”
Take a virtual tour below!
Video tour of Grasshopper Gallery art show featuring work by Kelly McQuain, Summer 2020.
“Never Stop Dreaming” Kelly McQuain
The result is a body of work rich with enchanting motifs. In some portraits, for instance, tiny robots appear, hinting at humankind’s need to reconcile life with technology and ever-advancing artificial intelligence. In other works, like “Fox Birds Hiding in the Brush”, a mash-up of birds and animals appear. Floral shapes also abound, evoking the exotica of the imagination as well as the wildflowers of McQuain’s youth. While McQuain is adept at painting human and animal forms, he often uses silhouettes to suggest the iconic power of his subjects. “Shape and pattern are as important to me as the richness of my colors,” McQuain notes. “I like images that pop, that have a sense of mystery and playfulness about them, that hint at stories.”
McQuain’s work hangs in many private collections. He recently displayed works at the Barnes Collection and the William Way Center in Philadelphia, the latter of which awarded him a showcase exhibit. His three-dimensional work celebrating the 200th birthday of poet Walt Whitman is currently on display at the Free Library of Philadelphia. McQuain’s portraits of writers appear regularly on the cover of the literary journal, Fjords Review—reflecting another interest of his: poetry. As a writer, McQuain’s poems have appeared in scores of national journals, and his poetry chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, won the Bloom prize. McQuain works as a professor of creative writing in Philadelphia when he’s not visiting family and friends in his home state.
Artist Ying Lee has chosen one of my works for the 8th Annual Juried Exhibition at Cerulean Arts Gallery in Philadelphia, July 1-Aug. 9th. During Covid-19 times, to schedule a visit with the gallery, contact them here. For more information about my artwork, visit Art for Sale.
UPDATE: 6/29/2020 — Juror Ying Lee awarded my painting an Honorable Mention. It’s pictured at the end of the second row in the image below.
UPDATE: Due to COVID-19, my artist’s talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia has been cancelled. I’ll provide updates if something changes in the future. –Kelly
Join Voyages by Road and Sea featured artist Kelly McQuain in the West Gallery for an up-close look at his Whitman Sampler. McQuain will share the origin of this unique sculpture and explain the significance of its hidden parts.
The Whitman Sampler is a box designed to delight and surprise. It became a way for me to slip inside Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and grapple anew with the good gray poet’s famous life’s work. I think of it as a visual poem, an homage to Whitman’s opus and an educational tool.
Based on an advent calendar, each box of the Sampler opens to reveal excerpts of Whitman’s verse as well as found objects repurposed to reflect and critique his text. My hope is that curious viewers will use the Sampler as a springboard for investigating Whitman’s poetry more fully. Think of it as play, a means to see how Whitman’s myriad ideas echo and resonate against each other in a visual way.
Join me Jan. 3rd at the Philly Loves Bowie art show, We Can Be Heroes. I will have a Bowie portrait for sale in the show at the National Liberty Museum.
Kelly McQuain 