Laren McClung is a poet from Philadelphia. She is co-editor of the anthology, Inheriting the War. She has led workshops in poetry at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island and in the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She currently teaches in New York City.


“In Between Here and Monkey Mountain McClung creates a space where love is rescued from tragedy, a space where the harmonies of a woman’s courage live. The troubles of a nation’s wars come to bear on a child who grows into a poet who must lift nightmares into her hands and remember. The result is an incredibly beautiful work with a lyricism wrested from the ache in America’s soul where poets repair wounded histories so they can claim their lives and our own.”—Afaa Michael Weaver

“'Because someone should know / I’ve been here,' Laren McClung writes early in her first book, the debut of an important young talent. Part sardonic, part Garbo-like, she walks the thin line between nothing and something as if she’s been doing it all of her life. Her catalogue of the end and beginning is moving, honest and fiercely focused—far from the usual suspects. These profound poems are destined for the forms they inhabit. Form as absence of form. Form as everlasting.”—Bruce Weigl

“McClung’s poetry walks on a tightrope of original knowledge, stretched between irrational poles. Her poetry lives at the center and furthest edges of human experience. Often while reading this book I thought, ‘She’s wrong about that.’ Ten seconds later I thought, ‘No, she’s right.’ Read her poetry, then look in the mirror: you are not the same person. Sometimes her songs are comedy, sometimes tragedy; they are not opposites. Tears and laughter opposites? Many of the poems are mysterious, passionate love poems, and there are war poems.”—Stanley Moss