For Kerrin McCadden, it's about time — both the poem and the subject matter. "Time" is the name of one of the five poems that earned the South Burlington poet and teacher the coveted place on the cover of the latest American Poetry Review. It's also the subject of the four other poems of hers that were published in the prestigious bimonthly journal's September/October issue. While McCadden didn't think that that honor warranted much attention from Seven Days, in the world of professional poetry it's actually a pretty big deal.

"It’s kind of like [making] the cover of Rolling Stone, but for poetry," she finally confessed in a phone interview. "It’s really exciting.”

By now, Vermont's poetry aficionados are probably familiar with the work of McCadden, whose poems are original, insightful, occasionally funny and always accessible. In 2015 she won the Vermont Book Award for her full-length  collection Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes. Then, after penning the 2020 chapbook Keep This To Yourself and a second full-length collection, American Wake, the following year, McCadden was honored with the 2022 Herb Lockwood Prize in the Arts, which came with a $10,000 prize.



“All of the poems are about time, getting older and what it means to be human,” she said of her American Poetry Review pieces. As she writes in the journal's featured poem, "Time":

Isn’t it annoying, how you can read all
you want about the past, but not go there?
Collect whatever you want from back then,
whenever, put it on a shelf. You can even
decide you like a time period, hit up eBay
or Craigslist, and in no time you can have
almost whatever you want. That’s it, though.
Like you can’t go hang out and get to know
your Neanderthal forebears, the 2% of you
that, supposedly, makes it difficult for you
to get rid of the things you don’t need.

In"Shit I Can Do Now That I'm Invisible" McCadden examines, in a humorous voice,  how her life changed in her fifties once society no longer viewed her as a sex object — or as anything useful, for that matter:

I take boxes of Cheez-Its off the shelf
and just start eating them, knock more boxes
to the floor and keep walking, workers
outraged—What the…who did that?
I put my mouth to the kombucha tap
next to the check-out lines at Market 32
and hit the handle and drink. I cut in lines
at stores, at airports. I stow away on planes,
find a seat and don’t ask for anything,
snooze before liftoff. I nap in exam rooms
in hospitals, jaywalk in cities, take what I want
in malls, wag my titties around, no problem.
I email my grievances, forget the compliment
sandwich, let it rip like I fart in company,
everyone looking at everyone else.
You all can hide behind your potted plants,
but I—I can hide in plain sight!

Time also rears its head in McCadden's latest obsession, Neanderthals, which, she explained, was inspired by a research trip to France last spring. Hence her reference,  in "Time," to the 2 percent of human DNA that is attributable to our prehistoric forebears.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the massive nature of time and how my life is actually just a blip," she said. "It’s not a sad idea. It’s just this beautiful feeling of being part of something enormous.”