Frances McCue

Frances McCue received 2010 GAP Award funding for time away from work to complete a collection of poems called The Bled. The title comes from the Arabic word baladi, meaning “hinterlands or desert on the fringe of a settled area.” The “Bled” is a hybrid of Arabic and French, specific to areas of North Africa previously colonized by the French. Frances came to know the word while living in Morocco for a year. The poems are an elegy, playing on Bled as a version of death. Her second collection, The Bled is a Washington State Book Award winner.

Frances received 2003 GAP Award funding to take a one-month sabbatical from her job as executive director of the Richard Hugo House and complete a manuscript of poems, thereby allowing the time necessary to make final revisions and address sequence of the project as a whole. “The Flaneur Poems is a collection that explores how women take on different artistic, cultural and scientific roles as they roam the city. A ‘flaneur’ is a term taken from Baudelaire that is typically a dandy who wanders the city looking for artistic moments. I want to extract the term from its 19th century masculine confines and bring it into the present. Some of the poems are written from the point of view of an architect and some from the point of view of an androgynous flaneur.”