Sketching Elise (chapbook)
    available from Finishing Line Press

Sketching Elise embraces love in all its contradiction and mystery. McPherson knows how to outline the haunting limits of personal connection, knows how to observe the struggles and triumphs of another person and make them her own through these poems’ hard-wrought lines and stunning images.
    -- Cecelia Hagen

These are affecting love poems, but they are not sentimental. individually and together as a cycle, expose and explore dangerous, authentic tensions between silence and speech, across time and distance. These brutally eloquent poems, reveal both fear and the desires that push one past fear. McPherson's language is poetic in the best sense -- not only are these poems delicious to the ear, but again and again they insist that language (the etymologies, the correspondence, the naming) is the world we live in, not just the mechanism by which we describe it. Sketching Elise reminds me that true intimacy is a great and rare privilege.
        --Liz Ahl