Jamie MacInnis / Uncourtly Love (Awry) 2025

Jamie MacInnis / Uncourtly Love (Awry) 2025



Every now & then we just kinda need to do a book as a public service. Jamie MacInnis (b. 1941, still alive? We tried to find out one way or another, trust us), is (or was) a rather striking and mysterious figure who published two books before disappearing from the poetry scene altogether. Born to a well-to-do Irish Catholic family, she became involved with the San Francisco poets centered around Jack Spicer in North Beach at Gino & Carlo’s bar in the early-mid 1960s (details of which you can read about in Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, who recognize her as “extravagantly talented”). Later (1967?) she moved to New York City with Larry Fagin, appearing in magazines & readings associated with the second-generation New York School poets at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. We certainly feel that there’s a quality about her work that connects those two geographically and poetically disparate milieux.

Her first publication was Hand Shadows in 1974, a side-stapled mimeo production from Fagin’s Adventures In Poetry. In 1976, she read her poems for Susan Howe’s WBAI radio program, and in 1978 her work was featured in an issue of Un Poco Loco. In 1979, she was awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. In 1980 her sole substantive collection, Practicing, was produced by Michael Wolfe’s Tombouctou Press, and she was scheduled (but did not appear) as a visiting poet at the Naropa Institute’s Summer Writing Program. Subsequent biographical traces and mentions are few, and her publications have become scarce, elusive, and expensive objects in recent years.



“Jamie, I see her then, good poems, great smoker, leaning in eye-to-eye, slightly turned, listening. Like the poems.” - Ted Greenwald



“I remember Jamie in New York in the 1970s as a bit of an enigma, but a beautiful one who was one of the great ‘poet's poets’ of that time. And remains so.” - Michael Lally



“Jamie was a presence in New York when I lived there, her poems delicate and elegant. I always remember her wistful poem about the cartoons in The New Yorker -- full of the weight of her various pasts.” - Simon Schuchat



“There are certain poets who seem to have been ordained with a kind of purity, who are totally present in their work, but not in a way that suggests their ‘ownership’ of the poem. I think of John Godfrey in New York, and Chris Mason in Baltimore. And Jamie MacInnis, wherever she may be. I remember being in awe of the poems in Hand Shadows and Un Poco Loco.” - Doug Lang

Uncourtly Love includes the entirety of Hand Shadows & Practicing, as well as a number of otherwise uncollected poems sought out from literary journals and archives (are there more? Let us know!). Rather than a final word, we hope this book will be considered as an attempt to rekindle a fiery light on the mystery of one of the more enigmatic and unread poets of the last half-century.

Perfect Bound / 7x10” / 71 pages / B&W Cardstock cover / High quality 80lb inners / Strict one-time edition of 100 copies / Priced to cover production and distribution costs / Not for profit