John McCarthy reading in Seattle at AWP 2023

Featured Publications

32 Poems:Our Once Content Father Recalls a Party He Once Hosted Before He Had a Child to Lose

Alaska Quarterly Review: “Many Savage Things”

American Literary Review:Noise Falling Backwards

Best New Poets 2015: “Definitions of Body

Cincinnati Review: “For the Armadillo, My Sympathy”

Copper Nickel:North End, 1997

Diagram: “Our Once Content Father Shares His Wisdom Regarding the Ever Expanding Isolation Between People in Adulthood”

Diode:Two Poems

Gettysburg Review: “Even in a Far Away Place the Work Day is Long”

The Journal: “There Are Angels In The Door Frame And They Are Us”

Hayden’s Ferry Review:Flyover Country

Mid-American Review: “Our Once Content Father Possesses Regret for Planting Marigolds” (Forthcoming)

New Ohio Review: “Confirmation”

Nimrod: “The Little Egypt Dive Bar Elegy”

Ninth Letter: “Potatoes and Buckshot”

North American Review: “A Good Marriage”

Notre Dame Review: “Aubade”

Passages North: “Switchgrass”

Phoebe: We Will Call This Comfort” and “Elegy Ending with a Burnt Out Light Bulb

The Pinch: “Hymn” (Winner of The Pinch 2016 Literary Award in Poetry)

Pleiades:For the Possum, My Sympathy

Quarterly West:Constructing a Museum

Redivider: “Daguerrotype”

River Styx: “Our Once Content Father Quit Drinking Without God”

South Dakota Review: “Genesis,” “The National Road Runs Through Central Illinois,” “Narrative in Which the Use of a Knife is Part of a Larger Problem that Never Ends,” Coming Up Empty on Devil’s Kitchen”

Sycamore Review: “Cremation”

TriQuarterly:Scared Violent Like Horses” and “As If The Shirt Were Standing Up Straight, Hand Raised

Willow Springs: “Elegy Ending with an Apology”

Zone 3: “Baptism” and “Sometimes I Call the Damage Healing”

On April 23rd, 2019, “Scared Violent Like Horses” was featured on Poetry Daily.