“What words describe these poems? Splendid, lucid, beautiful…each poem so beautifully formed, so beautifully and perfectly thought-out…poems of human actors and human actions being shaped into contours and lines, into lives of dimension, into the deepest structures of time and space…. These are poems of volumes of light, air so thick with light that small children float on staircases of it. These are poems of universes unveiled, complete and divine…poems of universal meaning and appeal. These are poems that are made out of that space between thoughts and feelings…poems of magic, the magic of poetry, somersaulting backwards, disappearing into the light on the water, into the wavering look of the moon, into the thin continents on which we drift, behind the horizon.”
—Lawrence Joseph
“Michael Gessner’s inspiration lies in the capacity of images to reflect depth off their surfaces. These poems, attentively made, occasioned by paintings, sketches, and other works of art and science, provide a study of image as the mediator between inner and outer worlds. His first deity is ‘the moon, most underrated/ Of gods,’ and under its tutelage, these poems shine.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming
Michael Gessner, whose poetry has been described as “striking,” (The Atlantic, David Barber) and has been featured in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Oxford Magazine, and in anthologies by Writer’s Digest Books and St. Martin’s Press, lives in Tucson with his wife, Jane Catharine, and their son, Christopher.