Michele Glazer鈥檚 poems take on questions of being and value, exploring not just what is, but how it is. The poems trouble borders鈥between self and other, old and young, sick and well, stranger and intimate; between physical states in processes of decay; and between line and phrase, sentence and interruption, prose and poem, resisting the desire for something irrefutable with an abiding skepticism.
The poems are drawn to missteps in perception and in language, those fractures that promise to crack open a surface to yield some other, greater meaning: 鈥淲hat is looked at is changed / what is looked for is gone.鈥 From this collision of passion and severity come poems that are strange and darkly beautiful.
鈥淢ichele Glazer鈥檚 poems let themselves be stained by their encounters with the wild; they send out runners; are viviparous; they abound with what Thoreau calls 鈥榠ntelligence with the earth.鈥 Though they are just as likely to converse with daguerreotypes, blown-glass blossoms, graphite drawings, or any other devised means of representing nature as they are to proceed from the direct encounter with the robin at the birdbath, by some magical transubstantiation of word into flesh, these poems surely become the living things that inspire them. Glazer presents her artistry in prime flower: full, entrancing, and, most of all, vital.鈥濃擠. A. Powell
鈥淭hese poems seem balanced on the edge of an enormity, desperate to be changed or 鈥榮tained鈥 by what鈥檚 unseen. Continually changing scale, stuttering and beginning again at the border where perspective suddenly turns 鈥榓bstract,鈥 Michele Glazer鈥檚 poems remind me of Elizabeth Bishop鈥檚 in their dramatization of the human cost of our need to map and know and understand.鈥濃擳homas Gardner, author, A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson
鈥溾橧 think you see me for nearly what I am,鈥 writes Michele Glazer, confronting the limits of language and observation with a rare stoicism and steady gaze reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop. 鈥楾he mind suffers / its margins of attention鈥 while offering us these consolations: exhilarating visions and re-visions, great beauty where we least expect it, and an encounter with the tensions and sensuality of sound, speech, and syntax. Glazer鈥檚 fiercely delicate sensibility renders the seen and unseen world startling and wondrous.鈥濃擠ora Malech, author, Shore Ordered Ocean and Say So
鈥淢ichele Glazer鈥檚 amazing new book takes on the powers and anxieties of transformation, as its subjects emerge from cellular states into systems of complex, interdependent need; as healthy organisms blossom into decay and disintegration; as inarticulable depths of sorrow are syntactically forged into the most natural made thing, the most artificial living being, of all: the true poem. Glazer is cut from no one鈥檚 mold, as individual in her powers of attention and feeling as in her stark orneriness, proceeding with cautious immoderation 鈥榓s if sideways was the straightest way.鈥 This is a work of gorgeous resilience. It reminds me why I need poetry in my life.鈥濃擬ark Levine, author, The Wilds
