
The Arsonist's Letters
Michael Tyrell(Author)
Backlash Press
Published on 1. November 2021
Book
Hardback
110 pages
978-1-954780-17-0 (ISBN)
Description
Comprised of poetry written over the course of more than two decades, Michael Tyrell's The Arsonist's Letters reckons with a radically changing landscape, where "infestations of coincidence" overlap with "reflective / tricks and rungless ladders," and increased surveillance meets the threat of looming extinction. Throughout, memorable historical and contemporary figures emerge: a cousin mistaken for the abducted Lindbergh child; a boy who must make a bargain to keep from starving in Mussolini's Italy; "children [...] / who swear live inside them /the entire populations of small countries." Including moving elegies for a dying mother and poems that puzzle over difficult family secrets, the collection also stands as a paean to correspondence itself, celebrating not only the near-lost art of letter writing but the spiritual necessity of the written message: "You carry an unsent card in your coat like immunity papers/ from one ruined place to another / where it is, at least, somehow, / always spring."
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Hadlow Down
United Kingdom
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
295 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-954780-17-0 (9781954780170)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Michael Tyrell is the author of The Wanted (National Poetry Review, 2012) and Phantom Laundry (Backlash, 2017) and, with Julia SpicherKasdorf, edited Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in Agni, The Best American Poetry, The IowaReview, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and many other publications. A native of Brooklyn, he teaches at New York University.