Lacemakers

In Lacemakers, Claire McQuerry investigates the timeless questions of relationships, of loss and longing, and of environment both natural and manmade. This informal yet haunting collection juxtaposes a myriad of perspectives—public and personal, interior and exterior, sacred and secular—to explore the fathomless mysteries that abound between one human and another. From the metallic hum of the air conditioner to the thrumming of quail wings in the Arizona desert, from the necklace of brake lights on the freeway to the more dangerous and intimate highways of the human heart, McQuerry explores the impact of our environments, both urban and natural, on humankind. Spirituality clashes with modernity in the holiest of places, and we are relentlessly confronted with the irreconcilable otherness of our fellow man. Above all, Lacemakers returns obsessively to separations, offering searing insight into our inability to truly know another person, meditating on the subtle abysses that eternally divide us from others.

Claire McQuerry is a creative writing fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia and an editor for The Missouri Review. She was a 2011 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prizewinner and a finalist for the Olive B. O'Connor fellowship in creative writing. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Louisville Review, The Los Angeles Review, Western Humanities Review, Creative Nonfiction, and other journals.

Check out her author webpage here: http://clairemcquerry.com/