Green Migraine
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Reading Michael [Dickman] is like stepping out of an overheated apartment building to be met, unexpectedly, by an exhilaratingly chill gust of wind."—The New Yorker
"These are lithe, seemingly effortless poems, poems whose strange affective power remains even after several readings."—The Believer
"My master plan is happiness," writes Michael Dickman in his wonderfully strange third book, Green Migraine. Here, imagination and reality swirl in the juxtaposition between beauty and violence in the natural world. Drawing inspiration from the verdant poetry of John Clare, Dickman uses hyper-real, dreamlike images to encapsulate, illustrate, and illuminate how we access internal and external landscapes. The result is nothing short of a fantastic, modern-day fairy tale.
From "Where We Live":
I used to live
in a mother now I live
in a sunflower
Blinded by the silverware
Blinded by the refrigerator
I sit on a sidewalk
in the sunflower and its yellow
downpour…
Michael Dickman is the winner of the 2010 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets for his second collection, Flies. His poems are regularly published in the New Yorker. He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and teaches poetry at Princeton University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dickman (Flies) creates personal, lyric panoramas of the blurred spaces between imagination and reality in his third collection. He contrasts violence and beauty throughout, generating momentum through clever wordplay and free-association to highlight the fragility of language and what it's capable of describing. Many of the poems are constructed in brief, sparse lines punctuated by a more flowing digression, as in "The redbreast kills/ and kills itself against/ the window// sooner or later the blood in the breast will break the window into hundreds of pieces you can swallow whole." The form allows him to reflect on varying spans of attention and the flittering of the mind between the dreamed and the lived. This is notable in his three poems titled "Butterflies" and enacted more subtly in his five colored migraine poems ("Green Migraine," "Red Migraine," etc.), the imagery in each of which is tinted by its own hue white, red, yellow, green, and black. Dickman demonstrates a sharp wit and is a keen observer of how language and place shape perception, his poems forming a thesis on how the psychic and the corporeal wrangle with each other in subtly beautiful ways. The contained chaos within these pages is a fantastic reflection of the world from which they spring.
