Free Verse
Marsh River Editions

Catch and Release
Chasing Saturday Night
in search of "Green Dolphin Street"
Lines on Lake Winnebago
Loose Change
Mead
Saying Grace
Slightly Off Q
Something Near the Dance Floor
Waiting For Beethoven
Walnut from Waterloo

"The Artist of the Beautiful"

A man in Hawthorne disappears
into his laboratory, into his obsession,
and with all the things at hand
he fashions a butterfly, a beautiful thing
of wire and string, of springs and gum,
and so I'm thinking I can make this
happen, this love we only speak of
tentatively, that I am more convinced of
than you, but certainly with the right
tools, with these steady hands, and all
the things scattered around my desk,
it is only a matter of time before
I can get this wonderful thing to fly.

I love Lou McKee, his work and his magazine (One Trick Pony)!

-Gerald Stern

Louis McKee is one of the truest hearts and voices in poetry we will ever be lucky to know.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

Louis McKee has a terrific gift for language and compressed story telling. In this book I experienced with him the migrating anguish of his longing, love, and solitude. He often breaks my heart. "Artist of the Beautiful" is such a wonderful evocation of the craft of art, poetry, love, it belongs in any anthology on art or love, not to mention both.

-James P. Lenfestey

Loose Change is a wonderful group of poems!

-J.D. Whitney

I like Louis McKee's poems a good deal. They make a quiet hit to the heart and head.

-Susan Firer

These beautiful poems in Loose Change give the reader a glimpse of how the speaker manages the memory of love and loss. However, the loss is only physical, for the spirit of the memory lives on . . .

-Tim Gavin

Philadelphia's Louis McKee's poems slip into your ear so easily, so quietly that you don't realize their full impact until you're finished and left shivering with a sense of loss, wondering what happened.

- Karla Huston