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“Can You Relax In My House by Michael Earl Craig is the prose poem, that hybrid form, reinvigorating the poem now, offering back its nomadic, subversive tendencies? If this debut collection by Craig is the result of such redoubled pollination, we are indeed lucky.
Question mark-less title aside, there is no forced oddity here, no pretense elevating the unpredictable shock value. Craig's crafted use of line and space stabilizes the fragile worlds he creates, as does his flexible use of found forms: stage directions, monologues, letters, philosophical propositions, maxims (‘... a duck cannot think straight / but this does not spoil our hopes for him.’), and blues riffs (‘You were at that round table in the sun, / why did you move? I said why'd you move, / you were at that nice table, in the sun? / You were just at that table-- / I said why'd you move dammit you were in the sun?'’)
If these forms seem to want to go to work for Craig, perhaps it is because he has such a keen ear and eye for the delicate, sadly human predicaments these forms so naturally frame, and because his images are set as finely as rare jewels into their slightly cockeyed facets--and set they are, never crushed in a torrent of easy, indulgent surrealism. Precise and solitary images (‘Pale green soapstone Buddha with a beam of light filling his head. / Sourdough pancake, with a mind of its own, much bigger than the table.’) are calibrated to produce tints of the unnerving, shadowy states we barely speak of: tugs and nudges of insufficiency, shame, powerlessness solidly root. It takes enormous fidelity to one's vision and particular sensibility to produce the effects shown here. Craig animates a world we secretly share, and the tension and kilter of his poems reflect ‘dreamish autobiographical thoughts’ with great poise. ‘I'm back and snapping/my dark cape at the edges of / our notion of complacency’ the solemn, slightly threatening homesteader persona on the cover intones in ‘Courageously Yours.’ So, too, will readers eagerly anticipate Craig's rousing return.”
—Lia Purpura, The Antioch Review
A new author, with a new twist on introspection.
An isolate, protracted surrealism attaches languidly to objects, animals, and emotion in Michael E. Craig’s poems of semi-rural outlandishness. Profundity takes its rightful place in the shallow arena: “You can’t step out of your tragedy, it wouldn’t be a tragedy./ Neither can I./ Together we walk/ and think thoughts in a cornfield. . . ./ A thing cries out from the interior of corn.” The reader is embroiled in textural exposition, encountering dark recessions of realism against the relief of interior truth: “Today you strike me as needing something./ So take my ten-thousand-pound typewriter . . . / . . . For here is an older,/ other world, taking almost forty sheep to make one sock./ A serious mist fills my eye. You/ have made me cry.” Winsome, ominous vapors arise from the combustion of “dreamish, autobiographical thoughts” with their counterpart, the cosmic laughter provoked by close observation. “A man had been out walking with a very long cigar./ As he passed by me, closely, I could see it/ was actually an eight-inch-long ash/ that he had, perched beautifully between his/ fingers. And that he had passed away./ And that his eyes were gone from his head.”
Endorsements:
“ I like being in the world of Michael Craig’s poems. Anything can happen, and probably will, and it will affect me in some small or large ways that I couldn’t have imagined. The precision of their imagery keeps me reeling with delight.” —James Tate
From the Book:
Montgomery
He wore a beautiful hat in massive mahogany
which he unscrewed and set on the bureau.
He loosened his tie and walked over
to the window; from there he could see
down into the courtyard where his dog was
tied, in the rain, to a tall hedge.
He kept his back to the room:
a silver probang lay on a black cushion;
a jar of tongue depressors; various calipers;
an old-looking telephone
with what looked to be white icing on the mouthpiece.
Montgomery tapped the ash off his cigar.
He cleared his throat and spoke: "No.
I said I saw a pile of hurdles
behind the meat plant." The nurse
held her clipboard defensively.
She nodded. She wrote: "Is
quite handsome. Is in need of a bath."
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MICHAEL E. CRAIG was raised in Dayton, Ohio, and was educated at the universities of Montana and Massachusetts, as well as at the Kentucky Horseshoeing School. He currently works as a farrier in Livingston, Montana. Can You Relax in My House is his first book of poems.
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