Poetry. In his second book, Michael Earl Craig blurs the line between documentary and imagination. The result is a mutilation of pastoral myths--a man who has ignored horses his whole life but now wants to try touching one, or two gay donkeys and their uneventful lives on the high plains--but also a tribute to the current-day West in which this author lives and writes. Objects frequently take center stage: a new and revered anvil, a black derby "soft as a colt's nose," a series of worshipfully described wristwatches. YES, MASTER sketches a slightly dented mental landscape touched by odd details and sharp mood swings. Speakers/characters bottom out now and again, dreaming of new or lost worlds, going off on rants or into deep sleeps, wanting desperately "to tell a story with the authority of mallets," settling for "feeling like a turd washed up on the shore of a quiet lake."

Author Hometown: LIVINGSTON, MT USA



About the author: 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 lives near Livingston, Montana, where he works as a farrier.

Reviews:
http://coldfrontmag.com/reviews/yes-master