The Arsonist's Letters

Michael Tyrell

ISBN 10: 1954780176 / ISBN 13: 9781954780170

Published by Backlash Press, 2021

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781954780170

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Arsonist's Letters
• Publisher: Backlash Press
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1954780176
• ISBN 13: 9781954780170
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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."

About the Author

Michael Tyrell is the author of The Wanted (National Poetry Review, 2012) and Phantom Laundry (Backlash, 2017) and, with Julia Spicher Kasdorf, edited Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in Agni, The Best American Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and many other publications. A native of Brooklyn, he teaches at New York University.