Travelers With No Ticket Home Gets Rave Review

Here is Loranger’s review:

REVIEW :: Travelers with No Ticket Home by Mary Mackey

Whenever Mary Mackey writes, she makes worlds. Whether you pick up one of her historical novels (The Notorious Mrs. Winston), her speculative early culture fiction (The Earthsong Trilogy), or her poetry (Sugar Zone and many others), you are guaranteed immersion in a universe that radiates from the focus of action outward. Her latest book of poetry, Travelers with No Ticket Home, is no different, except in that we journey without a guarantee of return. In this collection, Mackey transports us through several scapes, each as vivid as the last though vastly different in and of themselves. As she has in her previous two collections, she takes us through Brazil and into the heart of the Amazon. She travels with us there, but she is no tourist, as she and her husband, a professor of Environmental Studies, have been visiting regularly for over twenty-five years. This is her world, her backyard, a Rio and a rainforest that she knows, and she brings us to it with razor details swimming in verdant language (some of it Portuguese). So soon enough we find ourselves

nesta cidade dos sonhos

in this city of hallucinations

the air is like cola quente / hot glue

and the buildings are stuck waist-deep

in asphalt tão suave / so soft

you can chew it like gum (“Travelers with No Ticket Home”)

 or

suspended on a black mirror that reflects the sky

we pass our fingers through clouds

as if they were the souls of birds (“A Estação das Chuvas / Rainy Season”).

Both very real and, yes, hallucinatory, her tone and word choice convey the impact of the places she deems to take us on several levels at once, the experience steeped in emotions, scents, cultural filters, shocks and epiphanies and the cycle of life lurking in every corner. This terrain is gorgeous and epiphanic, yet Mackey pulls no punches; whether stewing a monkey in cream sauce (everyone’s favorite image from “In Those Days Rivers Could Not Cool Me”) or lamenting for

…this city of despair where the poor live

in cardboard packing crates and children

are born to be shot (“Where I Left You”),

she remains uncompromising in her vivid and deft recounting.

Despite what I’ve said, lest you imagine this merely a travelogue, as the title implies these are places from which we might not leave, or which might not leave us. Perfectly in line with that conceit, this book takes us beyond the physical world to journeys into the affairs of the human heart and spirit. For Mackey also ventures more than a few steps into the experience of madness (via fever, drugs, and the world-beaten brain); explores the deep dusk of grieving, where lost ones “move toward us slowly like swimmers / floating toward the top of a pool that has no surface” (“Dreaming of the Dead We Have Loved”); and lifts us into the more ecstatic realms of human love. These latter pieces are given a section and a series title of their own, The Kama Sutra of Kindness, and it is indeed a kindness to place these toward the end of the book, lightening our journeys after treks through myriad daunting terrains.

There is, in fact, an ecstatic quality to much of this book, regardless of tone and subject, and this is precisely how Mary Mackey seems to travel – by throwing herself into life and place. And as language is itself a vessel, a carriage, a mode of travel, it carries that same excitement, an intoxication by which she transports us into the realms of the jungle, the realms of the mind from which there may be no complete return. As she notes in “After Carnival,” “how easy it is to give ourselves to the gods, o meu bem / how hard to take ourselves back”. Do yourself a well-deserved good, and book a one-way trip with Mary Mackey right soon.