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
At once firmly contemporary and archaic, playful and somber, Pretty Punks’ most noteworthy accomplishment rests in its incisive coupling of the particularities of now with the largesse of eternity, reminding its readers that we all inhabit haunted land.
Tori Rego
”Review: The Ghost of Yeats in a Wine Bar: Jessie McCarty’s Pretty Punks”
Third Coast Magazine
2026 Pushcart Prize nominee.