Praise for Gun Poems:
Reading these daring and mesmerizing new poems is like hearing the final cries of the town fool everyone has ignored at their own peril for too long because the fool is a gun, and we are all carrying, even when we know what that costs us and what is to come. The great Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa, reminds us that “To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.” By this standard alone then, Michael J. Henry is not only an artist, he is an essential American poet, and Gun Poems is an absolutely essential new collection.
—Andre Dubus III, author of Townie, Ghost Dogs, and House of Sand and Fog
Gun Poems is a startling, necessary, troubling, courageous, beautiful book. In the face of our greatest, most intractable problems, poets remember, and therefore remind us, that the imagination is the only solution. To inhabit the spirit of the gun, and therefore to confront its essence, is an act of imaginative courage. Only a poet of great skill and creativity could pull this off, and Michael Henry does. The poet addresses the gun: “I write and write all these words,/ useless black stitches.” But they are not useless at all. These words gather us in our sorrow and anger, so we can resist together.
—Matthew Zapruder, author of “I Love Hearing Your Dreams” and “How to Continue”
Hunter S. Thompson reportedly said that the only interesting character in American literature is a suitcase full of money. But he’s wrong, it’s a gun, and Michael Henry’s Gun Poems is a masterpiece on the subject. Unflinching, wily, scathing, stand-up-and-slap-somebody funny, brilliant, and my favorite book of poetry in a very long time.
—Ben Whitmer, author of the forthcoming trilogy, The Nihilists, about guns
Michael Henry’s mesmerizing GUN POEMS summons one of the dark genies of American culture, endowing it with an eerily believable voice, psyche, and perspective. This is imaginative prestidigitation of the highest caliber, and one of the most engrossing poetry collections I’ve read in a long, long time.
—David Wroblewski, author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and Familiaris
With its volatile trickster—sometimes a man and sometimes a lethal gun—Michael Henry’s new collection chronicles our efforts to try and do right and to heal in a polarized country fixated with firearms. Somewhere between action and inaction and our daily gut checks, Gun holds out its heart to us with its gruff hands and powerful poems. It beautifully jars us to reflect on self-destruction, survival, and the injustices we witness while we are left wincing for more.
—Juan J. Morales, author of Dream of the Bird Tattoo
Praise for Active Gods:
“I love the atmosphere of Henry’s poems, the feeling of them tilting on the edge of something. On one side: a plainspoken everyman. On the other side: a man of complex feelings and thoughts, a man who notices things about the world and its inhabitants that both delight us and break our hearts. This is what good poets do: take us to places we recognize, but through a different lens or through a new door.”
—Thomas Lux, author of Child Made of Sand and The Street of Clocks
“Mike Henry plumbs the mysteries of daily life—its joys and losses and unbidden moments of grace—with a keen eye, unflinching honesty, and a voice that is immediately and consistently engaging. Whether he’s writing about mopping the floor, or his children huffing dandelion seeds, or grief that ‘sweeps the air in a thousand different hues,’ Henry is finely attuned both to our anxious desire that things be different than they are and the peace that comes from surrendering to what is. Active Gods is an intimate, good-humored, and deeply heartfelt book.”
—John Brehm, author of Help Is on the Way and No Day at the Beach
Praise for No Stranger than My Own:
If you hear poems in the body first, as in the best cases we do, Henry is your skilled masseuse. But beware complacency in reading this book; poems take off at unexpected places, zoom in on details in a vertiginous rush of melody, and turn quirky without warning or permission. Ride shotgun with his grandfather piloting a ’68 Caddy “into the bright Buffalo sunset/along Lake Erie, beyond the breakwall the cold rough and blue.” Climb inside his camera, “an eye that cannot blink,/an ear that hears the girl playing scales/amidst the singing insects.” Go with him and his woman to the tattoo parlor for a glimpse of her “skirt pulled up, black tree/ink staining the soft curve of your thigh,/my thumb in your clenched fist.” No Stranger Than My Own wanders an American landscape and an interior one with equal skill, the voice a witness without false promise. Go with Henry a while, and then, be grateful.
—Chris Ransick, author of Lost Songs & Last Chances
From Fenway Park to Graceland to Vegas and the Badlands, the imagination that sees a cherry-red 1968 Coupe d’Ville as “sphinx-like” (in “ Cadillac, an Ode” really a tough, loving ode to the poet’s grandfather), sees American history in Brylcreem and horsehair, in Edward Hopper and John Ashbery, an Elvis wall-clock , Elvis pencil erasers, and the pissing contests of frat boys. Michael Henry has an unerring, delicious appetite for details. This is not mere nostalgia but Henry’s profound engagement with the significance of the particulars, even the minutiae, of his country’s narrative, and of his family and their lost ones. He understands that in the act of writing we are always imperfect, only “using crude tools/to carry a message to those in the ether.” No Stranger Than My Own carries his message with great tenderness and eloquence.
—Gail Mazur, author of Zeppo’s first Wife: New and Selected Poems
Michael Henry’s poems are a skilled, luminous negotiation with the surfaces of life and the shapes of memory. A supple writer, equally at home in elegiac as he is in lyric modes, he produces a beautiful fresh music by working the ground where tenderness and rigor meet. His poems, shot through with feeling and perfectly crafted, are as happy sounding the dark classical themes of poetry as they are finding the saving glisten of the everyday.
—Eli Gottlieb, author of Now You See Him and The Boy Who Went Away
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Michael J. Henry 