Through Glass Rooms

Claire McQuerry

Free Verse Editions
Edited by Jon Thompson

Release Date: 5 January 2027.

Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-650-5 (paperback, $18.95); 978-1-64317-651-2 (PDF, $9.95); 978-1-64317-652-9 (EPUB, $9.95). © 2027 by Parlor Press, 98 pages.

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Praise for Through Glass Rooms

In her harrowing new book Through Glass Rooms, Claire McQuerry proves the wisdom of what she calls the junco’s “single strength”: “her foolish, faultless persistence.”  These poems persist in so many ways: in their clear-eyed accounting of a peril that is both terrifying and transformational; in their careful attentiveness to words as themselves substantive and consequential; in their brave pursuit of poetic and spiritual order in the face of life’s ambushing demolishments.  McQuerry’s own persistence has produced a truly compelling collection that manages, somehow, to be a page-turner even as its musical, muscular lines invite slow, slow reading. —Kimberly Johnson, author of Fatal

Claire McQuerry’s Through Glass Rooms inhabits the charged space where fairy tale, prayer, and lived experience meet. In poems of striking narrative grace and emotional clarity, she traces the unraveling of a marriage against the myths that shape our understanding of love, devotion, and identity. Tender, unsettling, and morally complex, this collection reveals a poet of rare insight and power. —Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears

Something of a contemporary Persephone, the speaker of these poems—which are, at turns, heartbreaking, at turns, triumphant—meditates upon the cruelties and privations of a bewildering season in the underworld, “those worst and happiest years.” Intermittent prayer and honest self-interrogation lead her gradually to exult in her struggle to return to the regions of light and abundance. —Scott Cairns, author of Against Certainty

About the Author

Claire McQuerry is author of Lacemakers (Southern Illinois University Press), which won the Crab Orchard First Book Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in poetry. She is co-translator, with Celine Bourhis, of Virginie Laluq’s book-length poem Cutting the Stems (Saturnalia Books), winner of the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize. McQuerry’s poetry and translations have recently appeared in The Sun Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Image, Memorious, Denver Quarterly, Seneca Review, The Shore, and other journals. She is a recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. She is Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. 

Photograph of the author by Matt Gannon. Used by permission.