A poetry collection about coming of age in the era of 99cent gasoline and AOL Instant Messenger.
irl is a chapbook cast in amber, a series of poems with a nostalgic bent, framed by clips of AOL Instant Messenger conversations. It is a love story and it is also not. It’s about kinship, communication, coming of age, and finding the right person at the right time. The poems of irl are tender without ever being sentimental and capture the agony and ecstasy of being seen as a young person.
"irl is what cuts through the radio static when the dead zone ends on a winding midnight drive through the middle of nowhere. It is the neon pulse of the lovesick heart and the shards of a glittering eternity. McMahon sings of the age when the small town last felt like the universe: of desolate landscapes crackling with life, and of the electricity of opening oneself to the possibility of everything."
- Amy Jannotti, author of Angels & Insects are Creatures with Wings and editor-in-chief of Bleating Thing Magazine
"A concrete journey into the sweet softness and earnest freedom of life when technology was a place to connect or hide free from contemporary norms. Wistful and immediately precise, irl creates a distinctive, trustworthy guide through parallelism and analogy, the smell of the earth and the quiet of the night, inspiring wonder regarding the relationship between peace and tension, the power of language to transport through time, and the joys or sorrows of recognizing in another 'my satellite / in a starless sky.'"
- Lydia Rae Bush, author of Free Bleeding
"Tender without ever being sentimental, even the silences in these pieces are deliberate and weighted accordingly. More than anything, these poems capture the agony and ecstasy of being seen as a young person. Where do these visceral memories go in the hearts of grown-ups? If we're lucky, we seek them with as much care, and turn them into art with as much attention, as McMahon does here."
- Abigail E. Myers, author of The Last Analog Teenagers
