POETRY BOOKS (click to order)
"I love Michael Meyerhofer‘s poetry. I’ve been reading it for almost 20 years and have never been disappointed. What I want from a poet is smarts and an awareness of social issues and a human sense of kindness and courage and resilience. Michael Meyerhofer has all that and more. He’s got his eyes and his heart wide open, and he’s here to show me what it means to be a good person and a great poet."
–John Guzlowski, author of Echoes of Tattered Tongues
"The masterfully crafted poems in this collection will call to us, in our deepest hours. On every page, you will understand why the 'sky will not forget you.' This collection is an exquisite examination of our bodies, the necessary journeys we must travel, and how one can find 'a blank verse sonnet in her rib cage.' It is a visitation of fathers, mothers, brothers and last words. As you immerse yourself in the book, you will find arrowheads and oranges, bags of sin, damp gravestones and the last barn owl. 'Beyond the phalanx of dogwoods' are these essential truths that Meyerhofer so beautifully explores. This book examines the 'dozens more dimensions upholding the bones of our reality' and always, always 'that we go on loving anyway'."
–Connie Post, author of Floodwater
“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, author of 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