Kim Horner McCoy

This Bony Cabinet Kim Horner McCoy

Do, please, check out the final stanza of "Flutter" for a nutshell demonstration of sound gorgeously orchestrated in language, or look at the sly echo of "things" and "rings" (with its diminuendo in "tightening" a few lines later) in this collection's first poem. But I don't want to imply that This Bony Cabinet is just one long tone poem. Billy the Kid awaits you here, and the architect Louis Sullivan, and the three major icons of twentieth century physics/cosmology, and --- well, maybe the heart of your own bony cabinet is knocking inside these lines too. Enjoy!

-Albert Goldbarth, two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle award




The terrain of the poems in Kim Horner McCoy's This Bony Cabinet includes roadside memorials, architectural monuments, and Interstate mileposts along a lightly-peopled diagonal between Chicago and eastern New Mexico. Birds frozen in sculpture, the shock of world events rattling the order, a way woke coyote tale, F5 tornadoes, weaponized airplanes falling from the sky, coiled rattlesnakes beside the trail-McCoy writes with lithographic remembrance, cataloguing unexpected detours, missing sections of map, and the lingering effects of disasters-both personal and collective-in her journey through early 21st Century America.

-George Frazier, author of The Last Wild Places of Kansas




Kim Horner McCoy writes from her soul. The poems in THIS BONY CABINET reveal an ear for language and a voice all her own. A mesmerizing debut.

-Johnny D. Boggs, eight-time Spur Award winner