About the Book:

In this deeply felt first collection, Kindra McDonald asks us to consider the great variety of unmeasured things nested inside “a simple life.”  To read through these poems is to encounter the familiar at closer range, so we can see and experience anew what we might have overlooked before: “whole schools of fish with holes in their lips/ bubbles rising from their hook-/ shaped hearts;” the vividness of citrus, the brilliance of kerosene fires we light to match the stubbornness of things that take root and grow in our lives. Throughout, she asks how we might learn to forget the small bright cruelties of love, the jewels we once wore like fireflies on our fingers. How does one forgive the unforgivable? Kindra proposes a way to answer— “To find in each other the word/ star.” —Luisa A. Igloria, author of Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press)

Just as the name suggests, Concealed Weapons serves us lush images that wet the senses until we realize its moments hold something else. And those moments: some small breaths of time (like the silence between each tick of a clock), some long and generational—each contain an uncovering, an innocence, a concealed weapon. McDonald takes us on a journey of loss and joy and how they echo from parent to lover to self and back again. —Michael Jon Khandelwal, Executive Director, The Muse Writers Center (Norfolk, VA)