Ocean Vuong meets Natalie Diaz in dreamlike, blood-soaked verse that explores the cost of memory and mourning.
Swallowed Light begins at the opened clearing of myth, at the mouth of history. In his breathtaking debut poetry collection, Michael Wasson writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure-the wholly American fracture of colonialism-where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing. These poems mourn and build with pattern and intricacy, intuition and echo, calling ocean and heartbreak and basalt, monsters and bullets and bones, until they form one vibrant song.Freelance writer for hire: music, movies, books, comics, video games, TV… (he/him)
Finished reading Michael Wasson's "Swallowed Light: Poems" https://t.co/umZRL2Ir9P 📖🖋 It ended as it started:a rather mixed bag. Ah well. #books #reading #poems #poetry #booktwt #BookTwitter #PoetryTwitter https://t.co/EBw9RVxpAB
Poetry Daily presents a poem each day from new books and journals, along with poetry news, announcements, and more. Est. 1997.
Today's Featured Poem: "Portrait with Smeared Centuries" by Michael Wasson, from Swallowed Light, published by @CopperCanyonPrs. Read here: https://t.co/ykYj8uCWiK
Copper Canyon Press is a nonprofit, independent press which fosters the work of emerging & established poets. We believe poetry is vital to language & living.
"Sometimes a collection of poems reads like a beautiful field guide. This is true of Michael Wasson’s latest collection, Swallowed Light" @OUPAcademic beautifully unfolds the map of MICHAEL WASSON's debut collection SWALLOWED LIGHT: https://t.co/gHYekQgrxI
"With this release, Copper Canyon Press has raised further into the light these remarkable poems by Michael Wasson. The earth has never been still. It has reverberated with the losses it has absorbed. Through his poems, Wasson has unearthed the buried bones of generations and brought their lives into the daylight. This is the work of a poet, and the importance of such work can never be underestimated."--New York Journal of Books
"Wasson's lyrical verse seems to turn over and over again, like a marble on the tongue, this idea of lost language, serving up to the reader different iterations of how language is related to culture, family, freedom, and the body."--West Trade Review