Tree-Lined Streets of Queens

The poems of James McKee's second collection, Tree-Lined Streets of Queens, remain deeply rooted in the NYC of the early 2020s even as they venture beyond the place and time of their making. Those tumultuous years, when days felt like weeks and weeks like months, haunt his poetry like the ocean's jagged rhythms, sometimes unheard, sometimes deafening. Across his book's four sections, the poems address the collective urgencies of history, race and ecologic decline, as well as the personal ones of family and memory. If anything in these pages prompts the reader to say, Yes, that's how it is, his dearest poetic ambitions will have been fulfilled.