Empty like a Pocket

What critics are saying about Empty like a Pocket. Molly McDonald has emptied her pockets for us, and – inverted and convoluted in the fabric of her poems – they’ve become little black holes, revealing truths that previously hid as lies. Her deceptively clean language will shake you up with philosophical blindsiding, then explode kaleidoscopic like a Jackson Pollock painting made of your bone marrow. ‘I’m burrowed so/ far inside my head I found a China no one knows/ about, ’ she writes, but it feels like somehow she burrowed inside my head. McDonald’s emotional archaeology feels necessary, though, not invasive; amid ice cream and dissections of car crashes, the ‘microscopic looming everything, ’ holds taut dichotomies together under her watchful eye - Claire Kruesel, MFA lecturer, Iowa State University McDonald’s poetry first left me speechless, then all the places in me that used to be cracks started shining, as I’d always secretly wanted them to. - Brett Brinkmeyer, host of radio show Firsthand Poet