Poetry. The second full-length collection by Cajun poet Micah Ballard, WAIFS AND STRAYS recombines the allure, fixations, and diction of the metaphysical poets with the alert and streetwise urban fracturing and amazements instantaneous in contemporary San Francisco. With the haunted elegance of Charles Baudelaire and the handmade warmth of Semina, WAIFS AND STRAYS is a rejection of a slick and disposable culture.
Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA
Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Micah Ballard studied at New College of California, working with David Meltzer, Joanne Kyger, and Tom Clark. He is the author of WAIFS AND STRAYS (City Lights Publishers, 2011) and PARISH KREWES (Bootstrap Press, 2009). Ballard currently co-directs the MFA in writing program at University of San Francisco. He co-edits Auguste Press.
Reviews and Other Links
Publishers Weekly
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright @ The Brooklyn Rail
81st Annual California Book Award Finalist
“We ‘exit through a trap door’ like Orpheus through the silvered mirror. We are pirates, inmates, benefactors, ghosts. We are always on the move, on a journey remembering to chart and map the future, the poems, WAIFS AND STRAYS, a magical gift to give away. This is a breathtaking book of evocations, provocations, revelations.”
—Norma Cole
“WAIFS AND STRAYS is an invocation of poetic ancestry, so as to lead the reader through a gallery of visions imbued with elegance and charm. I enjoy deciphering the marvelous engravings, names, and epitaphs mapped out along its pages. There is a chimerical secrecy at work in these texts, an awareness of the poem as conduit. Mark this encrypted province you hold in your hands.”
—Guillermo Parra
“A flâneur of the other world, Micah Ballard has been there and back, bringing to San Francisco’s streets a sidereal, stylish poetics deeply indebted to the predecessors whose work it reinvents. In WAIFS AND STRAYS, collage poems become a means to join forces and ‘form a heaven / underground.’ But collage turns homage into participation, furthering a long tradition of countercultural verse. It’s the wise dead dictating: listen up!”
—Brian Teare