Poetry. An isolate, protracted surrealism attaches languidly to objects, animals, and emotion in Craig's poems of semi-rural outlandishness. Profundity takes its rightful place in the shallow arena. The reader is embroiled in textural exposition, encountering dark recessions of realisms 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."--Craig from "I like wood, and heavy things made of metal." "I like being in the world of Michael Craig's poems. Anything can happen, and probably will, and it will affect me in small or large ways that I couldn't have imagined. The precision of their imagery keeps me reeling with delight"--James Tate.
Author City: LIVINGSTON, MT USA
Michael Earl Craig is the author of THIN KIMONO (Wave Books 2010), YES, MASTER (Fence Books, 2006), and CAN YOU RELAX IN MY HOUSE (Fence Books, 2002). He has published poems in Verse, VOLT, jubilat, CutBank, The Iowa Review, Dunes Review, and Provincetown Arts, as well as the Verse Press/Wave Books anthology ISN'T IT ROMANTIC: 100 LOVE POEMS BY YOUNGER AMERICAN POETS (2004). He is a Certified Journeyman Farrier and lives near Livingston, Montana, where he shoes horses for a living.
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interview by Andrew James Weatherhead @ Bookslut
interview by Zachary Schomburg @ HTMLGIANT