Sympathy from the Devil

Poetry. "In Kyle McCord's new book Gabriel empathizes, the Devil sympathizes, and an exhausted God watches a televangelist. Moving, imaginative and full of surprising turns, McCord's poems are alive with both the world and the dead who 'have no word for intimate, and a thousand words for blind.' I love the abundance of these poems, their humor, the music that made my ears howl and purr. When I dream about McCord's poems dreaming of me, I ride an aging mechanical bull, werewolves take over the city, Abraham Lincoln begs to rip off my blouse, God's love vanishes into my body like bread. I wake up hungry, afraid, laughing."—Traci Brimhall

"In Kyle McCord's mercurial and visionary new book, SYMPATHY FROM THE DEVIL, we see a bold refiguring of the moral imagination that, like a Dante without a Beatrice, wanders hell bereft of the traditional compass that would clarify the archetypes. Here the eye opens wide its compassion in the dark. Play transgresses and so, in opposition to the self-servitude of sublimity and rapture, sheds light on cruelties and exclusions suffered in the name of the ideal. Everywhere we look in this book, we find the generosity and precision of paradox. The pleasure of absurdity may distance heartbreak, but it likewise binds us to it, such that the poet's lightness of touch and ranginess of sensibility becomes indistinguishable from his vision, the sense that one half of sympathy is always the embrace, the other the letting go. A stunning collection."—Bruce Bond

"'What do you want from any of us, reader?' asks the first poem in Kyle McCord's SYMPATHY FROM THE DEVIL, bristling a bit, cocking its chin, letting us know that what follows will never be exactly what we expect. The book brims with wily intelligence and unsettling humor that challenge and surprise and thrill and move us so that in the end what we want is everything this terrific book has to give."—Corey Marks