Swimming Through Fire

There are killers among us. Seth Michelson wants you to know that. He writes poetry to drive that important point into our collective consciousness. Killers surround us and Michelson’s poems open our eyes, like broken windows, to the dangers closing in on all of us. Through his deeply figurative poems, we may find a path toward healing for a displaced, disaffected majority of humanity as it swims through the fires of a metaphoric Hell. These poems range widely in stories: from the Chilean holocaust perpetrated by the fascist dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet to the assassination of churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina to the breakup of a marriage; from the holocaust of California’s native Indians by St. Junipero Serra to the official sequestration of a proud black soldier to the euthanization of a beloved pet. All of those victims of the killers among us find their way into the penetrating and lovely poetry in Michelson’s Swimming Through Fire.