Life List

“The poems in Life List offer an extraordinary depiction of life from childhood through old age, moving us to tears and laughter through reminiscence, dreams, and evocations of classical and contemporary art and letters.”

Bonnie Braendlin

“McCann is a religious poet, but not in a pedestrian or fundamentalist sense. From Italy to Texas, these poems deal with nostalgia. How to retrieve ‘it’—if not now, then at some future point. How to please get it back. From a deceased husband’s memory to fleeing from the pandemic. From a crummy bar in Florence or a lost painting, we must go on, and we do.”

Sybil Estess

“How do I love the poetry of Janet McCann? Let me count the ways: her wicked sense of humor, her clear eye, her choice of organizing this book around growing up and growing old in mid-century America, and her refusal to give in to despair, though loss is all around. I loved every single poem in this collection, and you, dear reader, will too.”

Barbara Crooker

“McCann’s volume of new and selected poems, Life List, begins by taking readers on a trip to an almost-forgotten world of a childhood seventy years ago. The first poems reference such memory ticklers as bathing caps, jelly glasses, a child slung over a parent’s shoulder being called ‘a sack of potatoes,’ and the bright wax lips that were sold in candy stores as a Halloween disguise. We watch as the child of the early poems matures and steps out into the world with ever an eye toward the tactile, the contradictory, the urgent, and the ordinary, all of which she has recorded and generously shares with her readers. Later poems look back with new insight and appreciation for the life she has lived. The book is an invitation to each reader to give thought to his or her life through the prism of the author’s reflections on her own.”

Christine H. Boldt