Local Extinctions [Paperback]

Mary Quade, our lady of broken birds with still beating hearts, of the haunts within a covered bridge, is in love with things (empty dresses, sticks and branches, county fair food), with animals (a sick raccoon, moles, the last passenger pigeon), and because she is in love, she is both fiercely curious and deeply wary.? These poems of great, imaginative empathy are sharpened with the understanding that, really, we are so greedy, all unclean, all appetite. -- Kate Northrop

If you happen to be holding this book (the egg of this book), wondering whether to read it, would you please just turn to the poem Egg, a lovely meditation on the eggs inside the chicken's cage of bones, eternally emerging / one by one / like the same hot thought ? That's all you need to understand that Mary Quade is cousin to Mary Oliver, but with a darker, stranger imagination. I love following the unmapped, uncanny roads of her lines as they lead us again and again back to a wilderness we thought we'd lost. --George Bilgere
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One of Mary Quade's poems, making an analogy with photographic depth of field, begins by observing that The smaller the window / the more you will see / clearly. ? The whole of Local Extinctions, from the birthday party magician in the first poem to the American Legion pancakes at the county fair in the last, embraces that principle as an ideal.? The infinite care Mary Quade takes in framing and focus results every time in perfect clarity, each poem revealing something that only Quade could show us, as only she could show it. --?H. L. Hix