Overview

A record of a poet's wrestling with how to live and what to do; a provisional manual exploring how to be a better teacher, father, husband, poet, sibling, friend, and son. Written over a fifteen-year period, a period in which events and politics seemed to defy reason, the poems collected in Tips to Help You Do Your Best seek an imaginative wisdom on the outskirts of conventional thinking. By writing obsessively about the landscape, the objects that litter it, and the people he finds loitering there, Mike Carlson arrives at the emotional truth of his experience, mapping the distance between irreverence and irony, cowardice, and courage, condolences and pure clear words. In doing so, he also lays out a theory of poetry, a philosophical, aesthetic, and spiritual treatise that values object matter over subject matter. These poems approach understanding by image and rhythm, by light and shadow, and by means of encountering motorcycles and mushrooms and silos. While these poems often assume the authoritative and axiomatic tone of a guide book or set of instructions, they are at odds with easy explanation and drudgery.

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9781961209343

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Reviews

""Ever alert to “the spare electric mortal sheen on things you pass while walking to a shed,” Mike Carlson is a poet of presence—of mortgage brokers and baby gates, screen doors, bagel shops, hedge clippers and hospice rooms—with one foot lodged firmly against the door of inevitable loss. His quirky, big-hearted, always-fallible speaker—citizen, coworker, husband, father, talker to America—surveys our daily absurdities, our sorrows, failures and tentative consolations, the shadow of our mortality in every grave-sized cloud, but is no less attentive to our surprising moments of grace, even joy. To be inside a mind like this, with its subversive wit and idiosyncratic observations, is quite the ride. You don’t walk down the street in the same way after you’ve read Tips to Help You Do Your Best."" * Donna Masini, author of 4:30 Movie * ""Amazing Williams-esque pronouncements of great clarity fill this book—Carlson is not afraid to tell us straight up that the moon is not a douchebag, or that there are reasons people try heroin “that camping can’t resolve.” And like Williams, he says Beware of Ideas, and the poems are filled with that thing that poems have that’s better than ideas: life. They're brimming with life, with the external life of Brooklyn and of his days, and of the inner landscape of obsessions and coworkers and language. The voice is a genial mixture of student and teacher, which is to say, he knows things, but can’t stop stumbling into wonder. Carlson’s mind moves so surprisingly, you’ll shake your head. And the way he ends his poems is often shockingly like a head fake at the goal line: unexpected, perhaps not totally necessary, and absolutely awesome."" * Matthew Rohrer, author of Army of Giants *

Author Information

Mike Carlson is the author of Cement Guitar, which won the Juniper Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, New Letters, Seneca Review, Spillway, and others. He is a teacher at P.S. 107 in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

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