Pretty Punks: Poems, Portrait & Play


Pretty Punks: Poems, Portrait & Play
Three corpora in one, Pretty Punks forges a complex and intertwined aesthetics drawn from the American South, Irish/ Irish-American folk traditions, and the complexities of gender. "Poems" takes Yeats as a starting point and diverges with great urgency. "Portrait" offers a compelling told-tale about Louisiana bull riding and loss. "Play" features players contemplating the existential punishment of both facing and being death.
With drawings by Emma Wolgast.
Pub. Date: December 1, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9926955-0-2
About the Author
Acclaim
Jessie McCarty’s Pretty Punks is an emblem of a new and transgendered Irish noir. Green ghosts of diaspora sing Yeats a siren song, and grief is honeyed by a drunken baroque lilt teeming beneath expertly whittled minimalism. Inviting and illustrative, McCarty’s stylistic breadth is impressive yet consistent from line drawing to fable. This book is as much of a love-talker as the legendary trickster gean cánach, in that not many people write like this anymore. Let Pretty Punks seduce you, the words might just ring true.
L Scully, author of Self-Romancing