Running Wild

Author: Patricia McMillen

Publisher: Finishing Line Press (2024)

Patricia McMillen‘s first full-length poetry collection, Running Wild, draws on the poet’s mid-twentieth-century Midwestern suburban childhood, committed involvement in her Chicago, Illinois, and American communities, and the forays in and out of psychotherapy that have marked her first seventy years. Ultimately poetry deposits her, and the reader, on the cusp of old age, not without a fight. Fearlessly feminist, occasionally metered and/or rhymed, these are poems to read and re-read, on or off the bus, train, page or computer screen. A student of the late Maureen Seaton, Barry Silesky and Luis Alberto Urrea, among others, McMillen has more than a lot to say about living life on her own terms…her poems will leave readers saying, “I know exactly what she’s talking about.”