In praise of Pretty Punks…

Three corpora in one, Pretty Punks forges a complex and intertwined aesthetics drawn from the American South, Irish/ Irish-American folk traditions, and the complexities of gender. "Poems" takes Yeats as a starting point and diverges with great urgency. "Portrait" offers a compelling told-tale about Louisiana bull riding and loss. "Play" features players contemplating the existential punishment of both facing and being death.

Pretty Punks is a 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominee.

ISBN 979-8-9926955-0-2. Buy now at Magra Books

“At once firmly contemporary and archaic, playful and somber, Pretty Punks’ most noteworthy accomplishment rests in its incisive coupling of the particularities of now with the largesse of eternity, reminding its readers that we all inhabit haunted land. —- Tori Rego, ”Review: The Ghost of Yeats in a Wine Bar: Jessie McCarty’s Pretty Punks” from Third Coast Magazine

“Honeyed by a drunken baroque lilt teeming beneath expertly whittled minimalism. Inviting and illustrative, McCarty’s stylistic breadth is impressive yet consistent from line drawing to fable. This book is as much of a love-talker as the legendary trickster gean cánach, in that not many people write like this anymore. Let Pretty Punks seduce you, the words might just ring true. —- L Scully, author of Self-Romancing

"Pretty Punks is suffused with meditations on love and loss, hope and disappointment, transient spaces of travel and the comfort of home. In this striking debut, McCarty writes folktales for our time. Each word is a surprise and a revelation that feels incredibly rooted in honesty and reality, all while transcending the boundaries of what we know." — Mána Taylor, writer and art-critic

"Jessie McCarty's tender-hearted triptych, Pretty Punks, shimmers, each section luminous on its own and in relation to the whole, like jewels in a warlock's necklace. With precision and intimacy, interfacing with dead predecessors and ancient history, McCarty's poems, prose, and play summon the reader to a zone of shared experience where we cry, die, memorialize, suffer, laugh, thrive, and kiss--together, inextricably linked by our humanity. We are in an ongoing process of inter-relation, and McCarty's book activates this shared, golden sense. I am astonished by this poet's transformations." -- Logan Berry, author of Ultratheatre: Volume 1