In 2016, Black Ocean Books published a collection called Lay Ghost that featured songs that later appeared in So's Notice.

Mackey's poetry combines African mythology, African-American musical traditions, and Modernist poetic experiment.

His ongoing serial projects, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu", explore the relationship of poetry and historical memory, as well the dissonance between his American context and those of Africa and the Middle-East.

[6] Mackey has published five volumes of an ongoing prose project entitled From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.

The books are titled Bedouin Hornbook (1986), Djbot Baghostus's Run (1993), Atet A. D. (2001), Bass Cathedral (2008), and Late Arcade (2017).

[4] Mackey is the author of Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993),[7] an influential book of literary theory, and more recently of Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (2004).