Poems of Detroit, its rise, fall, and regeneration.

Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit

Literature & Fiction

Meisel, Ken

Literary

Blue Horse Press

In Ken Meisel's masterfully artistic Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, Meisel explores that existential insight with stunning intelligence and surprising connections creating a vibrant uncertainty about the stability of reality and the primarily unrecognized consequences. We suddenly see "bird feathers/bouncing in the waves/in a design variation," "a dress somnambulant/and accidental," and "ovular berries spotted with small, /black doll's eyes/wandering column-like." Everything is transformed into a multiple of contexts. Everything now depends on an infinite number of red wheelbarrows. Meisel reveals that we are never in a singular, predictable, nameable world. As he appropriately appropriates in his closing, we are simply here where "they saw the sun, /setting behind it, /all the world, a stage." - Jack Ridl, author of Broken Symmetry (Named Poetry Book of the Year by The Society of Midland Authors), and Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (recipient of ForeWord/Indie Reviews Best Collection of Poetry published by a university or small press), and most recently Saint Peter and the Goldfinch Ken Meisel is a poetic decathlete, and with each new collection he displays his prowess at a new event on new mastered terrain. Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance is such an event. The book, in fact, is a poetic triathlon, broken into three separate meditations on the themes of connectedness, separation, our human role in closing the distance, and respecting the need for consent in that transaction. Like Whitman or a Native American shaman, Meisel observes the natural world, letting it show us the bond between hawks, rivers, trees, cicadas, white baneberry, the hungry, and all "the earth's inhabitants" as they teach us that "we reach what is God only by what we witness." Meisel understands that what we witness also witnesses us, and the deft eye and ear with which he captured the urban landscape of a decaying Detroit in past collections are opened to a larger set of truths. These poems call on you to see the distances in your own life, to work inside and experience the often strange loops that envelope us all and to seek a harmonious consent on a world stage - to question, in essence, what it means to truly be alive. Connect with these poems - your life will be richer. - John Jeffire, author of A Temple for Tomorrows and Shoveling Snow in a Snowstorm Having just returned from a fly fishing trip, I'm inspired to think of how poet Ken Meisel is not unlike an expert angler. His words are rod, line and fly, back casting into memory and then loading the weight of those remembrances forward into the trajectory of the present. And always with a spirit for depths, the mystery of what's beneath the surface, and what might rise when one's bait most mimics life. - Jeff Vande Zande, author of American Poet

Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance

Poetry

Kelsay Books

The Light Most Glad of All

Ken Meisel's got the beat in his hit parade of Motown poems. I love his long lines and smoky fires, the effect gravity has on the living and the dead. His Purgatorio includes Marvin Gaye, an echo of better times painted onto a billboard overlooking the freeway and Dubois Street. Meisel is interested in the music of �grassy fields and abandoned places...wild pheasants and drunks.� He is our modern Virgil talking us through the Rinaldo Arms Manor. Read him and be saved. �Russell Thorburn, poet, author of Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged, The Whole Tree as Told to the Backyard, and The Drunken Piano

Beautiful Rust: Poems (Working Lives Series)

Bottom Dog Press

This is a book of surrealistic, metaphysical poems about love; poems of invitation, engagement, ordeal, passion and devotion. Meisel's poems evoke the sentinels of love through the wise voices of angels, swerving swallows, talking orchids, erotic roses, healing chocolates, delirious guitars, oil covered murres and saffron finches flying into sunbeams. In this book violins sing. Napoleon, Bach, Schumann express love to their wives, and lovers risk everything to stretch into love's healing powers of solace, challenge, forgiveness, empathy and joy. Leaping deer become violins, a wedding ceremony is held inside a fish, and angels--longing to be born into flesh--contemplate the definitions of beauty. Meisel's book celebrates the unconquerable power of the female voice--a voice of lyrical wisdom, honesty, beauty, fervor and grace--that dares the reader to believe that devotion is the aerobics of love.

The Drunken Sweetheart at My Door

FutureCycle Press

Ken Meisel's book, Mortal Lullabies, is a gentle commemorative collection of poems that pay homage to themes of loss and mourning. In these poems, Meisel fixes steady attention on the anguish and the passion intrinsic to all our journeys through love and loss. The poems are pastoral, meditative pearls, flushed with an aching beauty. Asking guidance from a host of mysterious angels, deities, birds and flowers, Meisel, along with these guides, moves the reader through the stages of grief, into the opened inner light of wisdom and reconciliation. These are quiet poems culled from an inner reflecting mirror. They are tender lullabies blessed true by the late afternoon's mellowing, mortal light.

Mortal Lullabies

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