Carrie McGath, Dear Anhedonia, poetry by TahomaLiterary

“Dear Anhedonia” is a poem from my second full-length collection, The Luck of Anhedonia. The poem opens up the narrative that will continue throughout the collection between the speaker and the character, Anhedonia. The speaker and Anhedonia (named after the mental illness of melancholia) find solace in one another in the poems and this particular poem illustrates their origin story. Here a reader sees what they are running from and what they are running toward — one another. They are escaping bad lives and relationships for a new life in the desert, a prevalent backdrop in the collection.

Carrie McGath’s collection of poems, Small Murders, was released in 2006 by New Issues Poetry and Prose. An AWP Intro Journals Award Winner in poetry, Carrie is working on her second collection and is a doctoral student in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (For more about the AWP Intro Journals award visit awpwriter.org/contests/ intro_journals_project_overview.)