'We're dying, all of us, and it does us no good to get melancholy about it. In A Long Time to Be Gone, Michael McFee examines aging and mortality–"oblivion's headwaters"–with the same clear-eyed exactness that has made him our greatest living Appalachian poet. Along the way, he chronicles the sweetness that makes a life worth living: Duke Ellington tunes, heirloom cultivars, sliding down a banister. In McFee's careful hands, even a potbelly, a dog lapping at a puddle, a forged Mickey Mantle autograph, or a long-held grudge can become a kind of celebration, a kind of reverie. A Long Time to Be Gone is a welcome reminder that wonder resides in the particulars and that as our bodies age, as we preoccupy ourselves with each creak and ache, we become more alive to ourselves."–Ross White
