The Undiscovered Room

Poetry. In her signature economical style, Jo McDougall invites readers into the small towns of the rural South and Midwest and the dramas of their inhabitants. Through her spare, stoic, and at times spectral form of storytelling, she depicts lives limited by privation yet buoyed by dreams. Grief, resignation, awe, death, and joy abide in her work. McDougall is wed to realism, but obliged to invent; it's these inventions that lend her portraits a singular sensitivity and clear-eyed register.