“McCorkle’s Seven Cycles is an erudite collection with Pound-like, dense, lyrical yet fractured language. It presents a polyvocal speaker. By focusing on various victims of tyrants throughout history, the author presents violence as cyclical. In ‘Radium Sea,’ we read: ‘I am told to carry the bodies out into the day, the dry hands/of sightless men will measure them, counting out hexameters for an epic/They will recite under a barren pear tree, with each body another stanza.’ These poems carry so much grief; they are haunted. They are dybbuks, as they give voice to the voiceless who seek justice. These poems imply revelations and yet refuse to be pinned down. McCorkle pushes language to its limits. Ultimately, the author asks us to stretch our capacity to hold reality: ‘How much grief, how much exile and burial can language witness and carry?’”

Ewa Chrusciel, judge of the 2025 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest

“It is hard to write a poem at all in a world that fills and refills itself with violence, in a world where ‘bless has its roots in Old English for blood,’ but McCorkle has found a way in Seven Cycles that moves me deeply, yoking unlike things together until they speak. Cy Twombly is with Commodus with Saigon with Lorca with angels. Cassandra is with Clytemnestra with Orestes with sirens. Gaza is with screaming gulls. Tyranny with crocuses. Birds fly all around. Here is something art can do in the face of violence—see it, point, write it down, the violence, yes, and also the birds.” 

Kathryn Cowles, author of “The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor”

“In the liberty of the margins, pastoral poets have always found a way to reject the tyrannies of any given moment by asserting values that are eternal. In Seven Cycles, McCorkle offers up a pageant of the eternals—from antiquity, from our present vocabularies, and from Nature in her wild persistence—to chasten the tyrants in ourselves and in our global distress. This is noble work.” 

Donald Revell, author of “Arcady and Canandaigua”