In the Bone-Cracking Cold

by M. Bartley Seigel

Overview

Artfully wrought poems tracing the intimate contours of self, nature, and history.

"An engrossing and deeply immersive book-part love song, part monument, part elegy, wholly unforgettable." — Roxane Gay

Immersed in the rugged beauty and complex history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, M. Bartley Seigel steers his poetry collection through the terrain of the tangible and the mythical to capture the essence of the region's mining towns and dense forests and the vastness of Lake Superior. Through a cumulation of sonnets, prose poems, and open forms, In the Bone-Cracking Cold unfolds across a year, beginning and ending in winter. Seigel carefully weaves and unravels the complexities of love and loss, the legacy of colonialism, and the deep bond between nature, people, and place. Poems like "Beach Glass" highlight Seigel's lyricism, while his series of sonnets and a variety of open forms reveal joyfully flexible innovation. With a voice that is both striking and unpretentious, Seigel's poems remain hopeful regardless of uncertainty and curious despite the threat of apathy, inviting readers to connect with a landscape as iconic as it is misunderstood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814352168
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	03/18/2025
Series:	Made in Michigan Writers Series
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

M. Bartley Seigel is a former poet laureate of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. His poetry frequently appears in literary journals such as Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, About Place, The Fourth River, and THRUSH. He lives with his family on the Keweenaw Peninsula, Ojibwe homelands and Treaty of 1842 territory, where he teaches at Michigan Technological University.

What People are Saying About This

Mark Wunderlich

Parts of our country have often seemed to exist beyond the reaches of art and literature, and the great forest of northern Michigan is one of those places. In M. Bartley Seigel's remarkable collection, the poet braids up language and landscape, giving voice to the spirit of a place—with its frozen swamps, wildlife, militias, poverty, its culture, its delicacy, and its beauty. With formal dexterity and memorable musicality, Seigel has made an important contribution to our understanding of what it feels like to fully reside in a location beautifully contended with by the poetic imagination.

author of Ancient Light and former Wisconsin Poet Laureate - Kimberly Blaeser

We might call Seigel's poems 'sacred holdings— / little haloed echoes, etched in gemstone and antler.' But that would miss the gut ache cached in these 'feral voices,' the 'dark thing' that 'hides behind the heavenly.' This haunting collection—part elegy, part praise song—is all search. The author reminds us we must first hunger before we can relish each unlikely feast.

author of What the Chickadee Knows and Weweni (both Wayne State University Press) - Margaret Noodin

In the bone-cracking cold we shiver and search our minds for memories and images to warm our souls. M. Bartley Seigel's new book calls to mind those moments when we see things with icy clarity. Of the many glistening lines to nourish readers in his new collection, one of my favorites is: 'In rolling waves of laughter, we rise to greet whatever sky awaits.' Seigel is a poet not afraid to greet the sky, the seasons, the stars, and all the brilliant new poems that he brings to life. Reading his work is an introduction to the northland he loves and the honesty he demands of himself. May his blessed poems continue to drift up for years to come. Ezhi-ozhibii'ang giwii-giiwemin. He has a way of leading us home.

author of A Fine Canopy (Wayne State University Press) and Fresh Water - Alison Swan

Near the end of this new collection, Seigel writes: 'all soft / procedure and steel // will.' It is just one moment of many where these deeply resonant poems become an eloquent landscape similar to the one in which they were made. To read In the Bone-Cracking Cold is to dwell in a kind of place few will know as intimately as Seigel does. Thank goodness he has made these, by turns, tender and flinty poems.

author of HOMES - Moheb Soliman

This collection pulls you into saturated, secluded intimacy with the paradoxically iconic and unknown Upper Peninsula of Michigan. M. Bartley Seigel is hospitably at home in this, offering existential, domestic, and sociopolitical meditations with the UP and Lake Superior as his scenic background and as his total reason for being; as the air and water they breathe and swim in, metaphorically and literally as Seigel does on every other page, floating 'out beyond the tree line's reflection to a place we know cannot be depended upon. Here we release our buoys from their chains so we might display our illuminated objects.' Ripples of interiority meeting real exterior space: that is what we need in a poetry of self and place. You'll find that here—one keen voice, sounding this deep corner of the Great Lakes.

bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger - Roxane Gay

M. Bartley Seigel was and will always be a poet laureate of the Upper Peninsula. In his latest poetry collection, he writes of bodies against the backdrop of dark, cold waters and a brutal but impossibly beautiful landscape. Each word rises from the page etched, carefully, in stone. Seigel has crafted an engrossing and deeply immersive book—part love song, part monument, part elegy, wholly unforgettable.