Blue Collar Eulogies

by Michael Meyerhofer

Poetry $12.00

Praise for Michael Meyerhofer

Michael Meyerhofer takes us with him everywhere he goes, from the back rooms of hash-slingers to the Star of Africa.  He weighs a whale's brain and imagines the "cattle-dark eyes" of Neanderthals.  I like these poems, kinetic and half-crazed, they remind me that poetry is an explosion, that energy plus mass equals a dark magic.
- Dorianne Laux

Dear Lord, it's getting hard to care
that dreams burn up like paper cranes,
that my wrists ache when it hails
and I wonder what kind of terrible age
we've been cast into--but no,
I think, it has always been like this.

Again and again, Michael Meyerhofer fools us into feeling sorry for ourselves for being so vulnerable, so open, so stupidly hopeful, in spite of all the evidence.  And just when we're ready to take out the handkerchiefs he zaps us: it's always been like this.  That's the whole point.  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

More From Michael Meyerhofer

Haikus from Michael Meyerhofer

Michael Meyerhofer on Verse Daily

Read Michael's poem "The Man With Half an Ear Gets His Hair Cut" on wordgathering.com

Read Michael's poem "The Diggers" on inkpot.net

 

About the Author

Michael Meyerhofer's first book, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also won the James Wright Poetry Award, the Annie Finch Prize, the Laureate Prize, the Copperdome Chapbook Contest, the Uccelli Chapbook Contest, the Codhill Press Chapbook Contest, and the Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, River Styx, Arts & Letters, North American Review, MARGIE and other journals.