Meghan O’Rourke, a poet and essayist, is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Sun In Days. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes, she teaches in the writing programs at NYU and Princeton.
The Hybrid Lyric
Sept/Oct 2017
Unnatural Essay
1 For many years I lived a normal life. Normal to some. Hotel Privilege. Etc., etc., as they say. But when I became sick, I discovered what I had always […]
Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter
Do you not want to be alive?I can’t say I don’t understand— To bring something into the world,a creature that will be ruled by the conflict between its “will” and its […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2017
Self-Portrait as Myself
And now I, Meghan, have grown tired, have come to the limits of my aesthetic fidelity. It is nearly summer, and summer seems shorter to me and winter longer and […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2017
Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughterxx
Meghan O’Rourke Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter Do you not want to be alive? I cant say I don’t understand— To bring something into the world, a […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2017
Dread
My keys jingling beside the honeysuckleas we walk home from dinner, our iPhones glittering with e-mails calling us to the things of the world. The moon wired to the skyby […]
The Kenyon Review Credos
Spring 2014
Available in Response
I’m writing this from the desert in Marfa, Texas, where I’ve spent a lot of time over the past four years. I wrote a poem here in 2008 called “The […]
Poetry
Summer 2010
Once
A girl ate ices in the red summer. Bees buzzed among the hydrangea, heavy as plums. Summer widened its lens. You would not believe how happy she was; her mother […]
Poetry
Summer 2010
Twenty-first Century Fireworks
It is a green landscape, houses stalwart as circus ponies, American houses, wet kids moving through them in Spandex bathing suits, inside, sandwiches with crusts cut off, windows flung open […]
Poetry
Summer 2010
My Life as a Ruler
1. The world, when I met it, lay about in broken pieces— a neglected toy. A red hill here; a river valley there, green and languid; a bridge rusting over […]
Poetry
Summer 2010
Appeal to the Self
Have the dowagers of delusion visited you again in their fat pink shoes, creeping softly over the Persian rugs of your creaking boarded mind? It’s time to get up and […]
Poetry
Summer 2010
Preparation
1. I walk though the house, turning off the lights. The lamps in the living room, where my mother and father read; the lamp in the dining room, by the […]
Poetry
Summer 2010
Anesthesia
Say I was searching for God. Say I was in a hospital with an IV in my arm, brittle plastic stem. Say I put my hand in mouth and the […]
Poetry
Autumn 2006
Winter Palace
By my hands I hang in the bedroomof a man’s strange mind.The walls are lined with fleurs-de-lismade from the fur of mice.Smoke rises in the chimney. Yet another plague—in northern […]
Poetry
Autumn 2006
The Lost Sister
She was a master of childhood, very green,very given to play, very sleepy, very grit of gray.I, I was a shadow in a tree for no one to see,I was […]
Poetry
Autumn 2006
Peep Show
Tokens in the slot:ka-shot, shot, shot.A figure in the darkness.The tin crankof canned do-wop. Someone is always watching—don’t you think?Duck, turn, and wink.Bodies at a distance—that’s what we are, raises, […]
Poetry
Autumn 2006
Sandy Hook
The fire burned my cousin here.First in his bed in the bungalow garage.Then at the lock, scratching in fear.Quick, quick. The trundle bedburned. The violin, unpracticed, burned.The keys of the […]
Poetry
Autumn 2006
War Lullaby
Wet daggers of grasscast shadows over one anotherbeneath the porch light— the boy stretched on the lawn,fighting sleep,fingers the tournament ring: inside the househis mother shouts, blindsslap in the breeze, […]
Summer 2010
Once, Preparation, Appeal to the Self, Anesthesia, Twenty-first Century Fireworks, My Life as a Ruler
Once A girl ate ices in the red summer. Bees buzzed among the hydrangea, heavy as plums. Summer widened its lens. You would not believe how happy she was; her […]
Fall 2008
On Louise Glück and the Yale Series of Younger Poets
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in the Fall of 2008; Carl Phillips is the current judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Ten years ago, Yale University […]