POETRY BOOKS (click to order)
“In Ragged Eden by Michael Meyerhofer, I find what I look for in poetry: the daily made strange, the dark illuminated, the disordered given shape. These poems transform. They restore. They sing. All at once, intensely modern and classic.”
-Paul Guest, Because Everything is Terrible
“In these brilliant poems, Michael Meyerhofer explores the complex and crazy world you and I wake up to every day. He writes about superheroes and poverty and death and Carl Jung and parallel universes and dictators and what you can see and hear while sitting in a bar where they’re mourning a dead woman named Lynette. And what makes all of these things jump up and shout is Meyerhofer’s love and curiosity. He’s the poet who wants his eyeballs to always be open, always take in and hug the things most of us are too busy looking for the next Starbucks to see.”
-John Guzlowski, author of Echoes of Tattered Tongues
In Ragged Eden, Michael Meyerhofer takes on the current political climate with his customary good-natured and sly humor. He also draws on the animal kingdom, algebra, and the third law of thermodynamics for inspiration in this edgy but hopeful book reflecting the angst of our times.
-Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Field Guide to the End of the World
"With a compassionate eye, and his trademark sense of humor that hooks readers from the very first page, Meyerhofer sends us back to our own earliest memories, and shows us a world of heartbreak and wonder."
-Mary Biddinger, author of A Sunny Place with Adequate Water
**Winner of the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest!
"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?"
-Barbara Louise Ungar, author of Charlotte Bronte, You Ruined My Life
"Meyerhofer's tough, lovely poems remind us that the aim of being human, of moving through what Keats called 'this Vale of Soul-Making,' is to rise above ourselves, to take this sorry predicament and turn it into something shining and valuable."
-George Bilgere, author of White Museum
**Winner of the Liam Rector First Book Prize!
“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.”
-Karen Craigo, author of Stone for an Eye