The lyric poems of Kathleen M. McCann's BARN SOUR are anything but bitter; their music lingers sweetly and long in the ear. "Kate McCann's poetry speaks brightly, deeply, about nature and our human role in the wide fabric of the world. Her deft handling of language, pace, imagery and all the tricks of poetry is a joy to read!"-John J. Ronan "BARN SOUR is all about risk, the pull and counterweight of the familiar to the spirit's need to surge forward. Kathleen McCann understands both sides of the balance, urging 'Let go the fight within and listen...' - to rain, to breath, to shell knocking shell on her intimately observed South Shore - while confronting the past's 'tempered hook.' Often elegiac, sometimes stoic, McCann's poems offer language for a troubled world that is never devoid of hope."-Joyce Peseroff "Memories so bitter: The adult child sitting with the ache of her childhood, with the demented grandmother, and the TV on New Year's Eve. As the ball descends in Times Square the grandmother calls 'get a pan and a spoon' and the lonely pair open the front door 'to the coal sky, banging the spuds pan through the burly cold.' That the reader concludes the only beauty in these scenes to be in the telling. And the telling is so fine, so true."-Barbara de la Cuesta