The Only Worlds We Know

by Michael Lee

Overview

The Only Worlds We Know is a nuanced and tactile look at both addiction, and what comes after. Patient meditations on loss and the land where the people we love live and are also buried.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943735655
Publisher:	Button Poetry
Publication date:	08/13/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Michael Lee is a Norwegian American writer, youth worker and organizer. He has received grants and scholarships form the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Winner of the Scotti Merrill Award for poetry from the Key West Literary Seminar, his poetry has appeared in Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel and the Best New Poets Anthology among others.

Read an Excerpt

“How much liquor can the body hold until the body leaves itself behind?” — from, Out There

“Every adventure is a creative new way to die; I keep on living despite.” — from, Row

“A group of dead friends is called a memory. A grouping of grave robbers, a scalpel. I know of a surgery that removes nothing, rearranges vertebrae into a necklace of names speaking into the dark asking me to join them.” — from, The Insomniac Maps the Night

“I reached so far into the medicine cabinet my hand came back out through my mouth.” — from, The Pill

“What a terrible magic, the day we find out who we really are.” — from, The Study of Words and Heaven

Table of Contents

I

And 3

The Law of Halves as Applied to the Blade 5

Hum 7

Self-Erasure as Applied to My Memory 9

Out There 12

II

The Study of Knives and Music 19

The Insomniac Maps the Night 22

Indifference 23

Sound Lost in the North 24

Erasure Applied to My Memory 25

The Pill 28

III

The Study of Words and Heaven 31

Certainty 37

Row 39

Tapestry in Five Parts 41

New Year's Eve, 2015 43

Leaving 45

Erase My Memory 48

At the Lake 50

IV

The Study of the Dead and Puzzles 53

The Construction of Lies and Memory 56

Rain 58

Spool West 59

V

The Study of Doors and Knowing 63

Look 66

Smoke 67

Glomma 68

Along the Spent Horizon 69

Mikkels Plass 71

Finality 73

Joyous Work 75

Just Yesterday 77

Secondly. Finally 81

The Middle Place 82

Decay and More Decay 84

Notes 87

Acknowledgments 89

Editorial Reviews

The Only Worlds We Know is an “act of remembering like sharpening a blade until the blade is gone.” Memory is shaped without resolution in these moving poems. They beautifully track what happens when unspeakable grief refuses to be silent.

-Terrance Hayes

Michael Lee has found new ways to write about some of the crucial subjects—love and love lost, recovery and addiction, the bullet and the pill. No wonder he writes 'For my final wish, another/ final wish,' wishing to keep writing poems forever."

-Billy Collins

Worlds exists in the aftermath of grief, violence and addiction. These are not easy poems, and Lee offers no easy solutions . . . Yes, there's wreckage here, but also these words will carry you. This is a striking debut collection—a voice that feels urgent, honest, and earned."

-Matthew Olzmann

From the Publisher