"How can you not love a collection that contains poems like 'The World's Oldest Dildo,''Zen for Dummies' (in which one coed explains to another, 'that life is meaningless / but, you know, in a good way,') 'Miracle Mike,' a rooster who lived two years without his head, and 'Turritopsis Nutricola,' and immortal jellyfish?"



"Michael Meyerhofer's Pure Elysium is a paradise, a sweet ride through imagination's wide, un-mown fields. These compact and wildly various poems--funny, serious, personal, global--continually surprise and delight."



“Michael Meyerhofer's poems reside mainly in narrative. But even though they typically begin and operate in story, they often end with an interesting lyric curl, and it is these endings that make me want to go back and reconsider their lineages.”



“What is striking about [Leaving Iowa] is its unabashed confessionalism. But it is confessionalism that has an effect on the reader—not just the effect of catharsis for the writer, like so many poems that tread into personal black waters. In writing about his own life, the death of his mother, his childhood poverty, his medical problems at birth that left visible marks on him for a lifetime—Meyerhofer offers a brand new way of seeing.”



“…Meyerhofer is always the poet who sees what we don’t want to see precisely when we least want to see it. If there is a thing to be said that decorum would rather skirt, he is going to say it, and yet, curiously, he is not a poet you have to be up to. He comes upon you like weather.”