What critics are saying about Empty like a Pocket. “Molly McDonald has emptied her pockets for us, and — inverted and convoluted in the fabric of her poems — they’ve become little black holes, revealing truths that previously hid as lies. Her deceptively clean language will shake you up with philosophical blindsiding, then explode kaleidoscopic like a Jackson Pollock painting made of your bone marrow. ‘I’m burrowed so/ far inside my head I found a China no one knows/ about,’ she writes, but it feels like somehow she burrowed inside my head. McDonald’s emotional archaeology feels necessary, though, not invasive; amid ice cream and dissections of car crashes, the ‘microscopic looming everything,’ holds taut dichotomies together under her watchful eye” – Claire Kruesel, MFA lecturer, Iowa State University

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“McDonald’s poetry first left me speechless, then all the places in me that used to be cracks started shining, as I’d always secretly wanted them to.” – Brett Brinkmeyer, host of radio show Firsthand Poetry