"Nathan McClain's Previously Owned is no-nonsense, meat and potatoes, good gotdam poetry."
 

-John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

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Nathan is a poet, editor, and educator living in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), and his poems and prose have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, The Critical Flame, and upstreet, among others.  He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literary Arts at Hampshire College, and serves as Poetry Editor of The Massachusetts Review.

FEATURED POEM

 

from "Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot"

 

So what

others have moved on

to new rooms? Left

 

you comfortless,

with your notepad

and pen. And what

 

have you learned from

standing here so long

examining pain? No

 

matter how ancient.

What good

has it done you?

​

--first published in The Rumpus