About

This collection gathers major poems from Michelle Boisseau’s previous collections A Sunday in God Years, Trembling Air, Understory, No Private Life, and Indian Summer, as well as uncollected poems and interview excerpts from her three appearances on the nationally syndicagted public radio program New Letters on the Air.

Author

Michelle Boisseau was the author of several previous books of poetry, including Trembling Air, a PEN USA finalist, Understory, winner of the Morse Prize, and her university textbook, Writing Poems, initiated by the late Robert Wallace and co-edited most recently with her colleague Hadara Bar-Nadav. Boisseau was a Guggenheim fellow and received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Prior to her untimely death in 2017, she taught in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She was an associate editor for BkMk Press and a contributing editor of New Letters magazine.

Praise

“I always said Michelle Boisseau was tough. In Luminous Blue Variables: and Other Major Poems, she stands witness to our guilt, cruelty, and inherent sadness.'[H]ow little of history / is ever reeled in and put away.’ Of whom or what does she not speak? Pliny the Elder, the Stasi and the Berlin Wall, Voltaire, slavery, the Gestapo, her father, and, in a language that glistens, Danaë in her “tower of light”—the golden rain. Moving from the personal to the universal and back again, she shows, with an exquisite eye for detail, how ‘One life is so small its story fits everywhere.’ A wonderful read.”
—Alice Friman, author of Zoo

“My great friend in poetry for 40 years, Michelle and I shared a love of baseball, fathers in radio, and often an ambition for a longer symphonic poem that fully explored concepts and the permutations of imagery as they formed and amplified core emotion and thought. But always I admired her talent, equaled by few, for precision and economy in the longer forms that boosted the signal of the poem and made it resonate. I admired her poetic acumen which so subtly drove the poems, and especially her fierce and unflinching intelligence that produced and joined engaging images that took on larger metaphysical problems as well as our mortality. We both were survivors of Catholic school, yet somehow retained a subtext that attracted us to cosmology, what that might suggest about a life beyond the planet, or not. And yet, all her poems are accessible, grounded with specifics and a deep, compelling humanity that speak honestly to us for all of their brilliance. I loved her exceptional energy and love for poetry and life. This exceptional collection of her poems is a testament to that. As it’s written of Luminous Blue Variables: ‘. . . because of these stars’ . . . high luminosity, their lifetime is very short. . . .” There was no shining like Michelle’s.”
—Christopher Buckley

“Michelle Boisseau takes history personally in her poetry, the history of the planet and the record of earth rubbed into her palms and knees as a little girl, the history of physics and her father’s voice traveling the radio waves, the history of slavery and the Civil War and her family’s part in both. She takes the long view, but always with the lively, local detail in the foreground. Though we have lost her much too soon, we can be grateful that we hear her voice and see with her vision in these intense, humane, and original poems.”
—Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry and Dailiness

Publisher

Distributed for BkMk Press.