Trembling Air

About

In these poems, Michelle Boisseau troubles sound into music and light into color. She renders the physics of absence and the deceptions of presence: a garage full of haunted tools, the ordinary and odd lives embodied in medieval paintings, the voice of a father traveling on radio waves. The poems’ contemplative, rigorous intelligence affirms pleasure in the fallen world, picking out the golden thread in a dark tapestry. Moving through us in waves of light and sound, the words and trappings of the material world brim here with spiritual force and resonate with the power of things poised on the brink of revelation: trembling 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

“A troubling music, a poignant mortality—Michelle Boisseau comes into full maturity in Trembling Air, her learned and heartbreaking third book of poems.”
—Edward Hirsch