Michael McFee presents A LONG TIME TO BE GONE at Flyleaf Books

Poems that discover enduring pleasures in the details of our everyday lives.

Michael McFee’s twelfth collection of poetry explores challenging subjects—the realities of aging, the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the disappearance of Appalachian culture—in poems that discover enduring pleasures in the details of our everyday lives. It also includes vivid, lively, and imaginative responses to quirky words, a jazz standard, family members, celebrities, and several paintings. As one reader has said, “In his poems filled with quotidian experience, the objects of the material world shimmer with consequence: they are alight with attention—McFee’s, and through his art, ours. He is one of our best poets.”

Asheville native Michael McFee is the author or editor of seventeen books of poetry and prose, including Appointed Rounds: Essays (Mercer University Press, 2018). He will read poems from his new collection, A Long Time to Be Gone, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. The Doris Betts Term Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, he has taught in the Creative Writing Program since 1990.