These are poems for all times but very specifically for today—when we so badly need words to show us the way out of an abandonment of all truth and morality. The epigraph from Aldous Huxley tells us “the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.” Huxley means something different from what Heraclitus meant when he said: “you can’t step into the same river twice.” McCarthy’s poems respond to Huxley’s affirmation with power and precision.

    Margaret Randall, author of I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary

One is captured by a McCarthy poem by its quiet voice and telling imagery, whether the images arrive from woodlands along the Susquehanna, or from remembrances of serving in Vietnam, long ago.  This is a book of wise and wistful remembering, beautifully told.

    John Balaban, author of Remembering Heaven’s Face and Empires

Door in the Wall is startlingly intimate and delicate—in an age of bombast and public shaming—drawing us, as only the best poetry can, into a quiet inner life and then, subtly, but with acute sharpness, touching the horrific aftermath of war.   McCarthy’s poems are witty, contemporary, and funny, too, from Amy Winehouse to the Vietnam war—he exposes the deep complexity and mystery of memory and time.

    David Means, author of Hystopia: a novel, and Instructions for a Funeral