Gillian McCain
Gillian McCain (born January 1, 1966) is a Canadian poet, author, and photography collector best known for Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, which she co-wrote with Legs McNeil.
Portions of her "found photo" collection have been featured in magazines, published as limited edition books, and exhibited at the Camera Club of New York gallery.
In 1991 she founded the Friday Night Series—a weekly event that featured poetry, fiction, non-fiction, theme readings, tributes, lectures, performance art and music.
It is now published in Brazil, China, The Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Sweden and Spain.
In 2014, McCain and McNeil collaborated again to edit Dear Nobody: The True Diary of Mary Rose, a compilation of journal entries written by a 17-year-old Pennsylvania teenager who suffered from drug addiction, alcoholism, and cystic fibrosis.
McCain and Mary Rose's mother were interviewed in 2014 for a segment called, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl: ‘The Jane Austen Of Juvenile Delinquents’" for the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC-FM.
"[21] Said poet John Ashbery of Tilt, "Gillian McCain's poems are like urgent telegrams from the next door, or oddly but brilliantly cropped snapshots of a life that is going by."
"Her work features ‘I did this then I did that’ New York School immediacy, but undermines it with ironic distance that collapses any naïve faith in the immediate as a source of value," said poet Mark Wallace in a review in the Poetry Project Newsletter.
Forgotten, discarded, orphaned, lost; stolen, bought, discovered or found; the vernacular images in "HELP ME" were culled from McCain's extensive collection of photographs in formats including tin-types, cabinet cards, Polaroids, and snapshots.
[25] In The New Yorker, photography critic Vince Aletti called the exhibition "exhilarating," stating, "Images of rifles, costumes, and injuries crop up repeatedly, but there's no real theme, only plenty of diverting quirkiness and inspiration.
