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Reviews

""Angel Sharpening its Beak is a sublime book of gathering darkness. Vaporous and seductive, Michael McGriff’s poetry documents the richness and cruelty of American life, in which the perfectly rendered image is the only stay against death, against forgetting: 'Thunderheads stack above the crow / whose reflection crosses / the oiled skin of my coffee / while it cools in my hands.' In their embrace of winter, their courtship of oblivion, McGriff’s new poems are dangerously beautiful."" * Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers and Second Empire * ""Angel Sharpening its Beak paints the whole, unseen, desolate town that Keats invokes in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' After the ardent young lovers and before truth and beauty, there is everyone else, with their river and sea, dike and field, woodstove, blue tarp, burn pile, pill bottles, and broken animals. In a voice that is both knife-sharp and mystic, Michael McGriff does not spare the pastoral, but takes it to the altar and asks why it should continue to live. The answer is laced like veins throughout this gorgeous book."" * Maria Hummel, author of Goldenseal and Lessons in Red * “""It’s inconvenient,' Michael McGriff writes, 'to think about the poor and their tasks.' Thankfully, he doesn’t give a damn about convenience or decorum. The desperate smell of cigarette smoke, work sweat, and disappointment clings to these vibrant new poems, permeating the air of a coastal mill town where 'the past is free / but the future / will cost you.' As ever, the neglected and ignored traipse through McGriff’s surreal landscapes, providing glimpses to 'the backcountry of the afterlife.' When 'God chips a tooth / against our ribs,' we feel the dull throb that won’t abate. After all, what can any father say when his son asks, 'When you’re dead, will I have a father?' As in his past work, McGriff brilliantly explores the emotional underground we share, demanding we pay attention to the 'wailing / and the sound of water / deep at the back of it all.'” * Todd Davis, author of Coffin Honey and Native Species * ""How does home haunt us, follow us even as we leave its boundaries—geographic, economic, or otherwise? For Michael McGriff, this a rich and enduring question. 'I hear a voice rise up / from a cigarette burn / in the seat,' he writes in Angel Sharpening its Beak, a book that honors the busted trucks, gray wood, body-breaking jobs, bad water, and beautiful moonlit horses of Western Oregon. These limpid poems show how daily, working-class mundanity can be pulsed by vast spiritual mysteries."" * Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry *

Author Information

Michael McGriff is the author of five poetry collections, including Eternal Sentences, Early Hour, Home Burial, and Dismantling the Hills. His other books include the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (coauthored with J.M. Tyree); an edition of David Wevill’s essential writing, To Build My Shadow a Fire; and a translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola. He co-directs the creative writing program at the University of Idaho.

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