This is What was Next is a collection of contemporary poetry that binds a profound love and grief for the natural world with considerations of atheism, exploring and ultimately celebrating the freedom and healing to be found in self-honesty. McKay delights in sudden leaps between hallucinatory lyricism and meticulously patterned language games; between the starkly personal and tongue-and-cheek musings of artistic self-promotion.
"The lines of This is What was Next are so precise, so tense, that they function like the wires of a finely tuned piano, or the silk of a spider's web. The text, with a tiny movement of word, a repetition, alternation, or change, fixes you in place or enraptures you with a tone. This is ecological poetry with a radical philosophy of mind, in the tradition of Lorine Niedecker or R. F. Langley; more than just troubled observations from the edge of nature, they turn back on us what Donna Haraway calls our 'complicity' with other organisms until we are, as McKay writes, 'struck anonymous'. "
-Callie Gardner, author of naturally it is not