Thomas McGonigle is a creature of the cultural scene of writers and poets as it once existed in downtown New York. Of particular note, he befriended and worked with the late David G. Rattray, poet, translator, and uncle of this newspaper’s editor, and traveled in the same circle as another poet with East Hampton connections, Eileen Myles, whose last collection, “a Working Life,” he reviewed in these pages a year ago.
But to East Enders, Mr. McGonigle might be best known for his unconventional “Going to Patchogue,” about his hometown, first published by the Dalkey Archive in 1992, and once described in The Star as a “metafictional novel of loss, identity, and discovery” grappling with “how one’s sense of self is determined by one’s relationship with and understanding of the past and the place one grew up.”
It is now out in a new paperback edition from Tough Poets Press with a new afterword by the author. A new cover photo by him, too.
