Megan Gannon

White Nightgown

Megan Gannon

From the ruins of ocean liners and model cities, to the dark impulses of Greek myths and biblical narratives, poet Megan Gannon casts a wide thematic net in tracing the legacy of desire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With the lyric compression of Emily Dickinson, the syntactical momentum and surrealist imagery of Sylvia Plath, the poems in White Nightgown examine how desire serves as both a creative and a destructive force, drawing loved ones near to us and pushing them away, destroying nations as well as shaping them. In Gannon's poems, the vestiges of desire are as encompassing as water, as enduring and semi-visible as ghosts.

Cumberland

Megan Gannon

In the fictional coastal town of Cumberland, Georgia, fifteen-year-old twin sisters Ansel and Isabel Mackenzie have lived with their eccentric grandmother since a car accident killed their parents and paralyzed Isabel. Over the past seven years the responsibility of caring for her sister has fallen increasingly on Ansel. However, as she cultivates a romantic relationship with a local boy, as well as an artistic apprenticeship with a visiting photographer, Ansel's growing desire for independence compromises her ability to care for her sister, threatening their sororal connection, and ultimately, Isabel's life. Juxtaposing Ansel's traditional narrative against Isabel's poetic prose, Cumberland highlights the conflicts between independence and familial duty, the difficulty of balancing the dark draws of the body against the brighter focus of the mind. Megan Gannon was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and is a graduate of Vassar College (BA), the University of Montana (MFA) and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (PhD). She also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia, West Africa from 1998-2000. Her poetry chapbook, The Witch's Index, was published by Sweet Publications in 2012, and her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Third Coast, The Notre Dame Review, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and The Best American Poetry 2006. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where she is currently at work on her second novel.