How to Become Invisible

"Come to me / when you have wrestled / with the angel / no one else can see..." Has there ever been a more welcoming invitation to a book? I soon gave up trying to mark favorite and most powerful phrases. Mary McCarthy knows that every line, like every life experience, is essential to the whole.

I've admired McCarthy as an ekphrastic poet for years, so I'm delighted to find she's just as eloquent (and bravely vulnerable) in sharing her struggles through depression. How to Become Invisible is more than good reading. It can be life changing for those wanting to become visible again.

-Alarie Tennille, author of Three A.M. at the Museum and Running Counterclockwise



This is a superb collection of poems that a detail personal account of experiencing bipolar disorder. Both depression and mania are vividly described, as well as the details of electroshock treatment. "You can't prepare for a catastrophe," the speaker states. Neither can you prepare for the startling drama of these poems.

-Oriana Ivy, author of How to Jump From a Moving Train and Paradise Anonymous



In her hard-hitting new collection, How to Become Invisible (Kelsay, 2023), Mary McCarthy takes the role of Dante's Virgil, guiding us through the hell of bipolar disorder, where every ordinary object conceals a wealth of dark meaning, and the current moment "will always be an unexpected stranger/coming at you quick/as a bullet/you must catch in your teeth" (Challenges). However, while Virgil's path leads toward paradise, this dead-end road does not. The enforced normality of medication and shock treatment renders patients' minds "clean as a stone" (ECT The Curing), monochromatic and anonymous, nothing the speaker can recognize as "normal." At the last, our guide looks backward at the intensity of madness, enticing us to rejoin her "when [we too] have wrestled/with the angel/no one else can see" (Invitation).



-Robbi Nester, author of Balance (White Violet, 2012), A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019), http://www.robbinester.net