Phantom Laundry

“Wet and cold my country, where the softener seeps in but the powder burns still in washing tone.” Through prose poems, found-verse collages, fractured short stories, and micro-fictions, Michael Tyrell’s Phantom Laundry reveals an America caught in a ferocious cycle—fixed on apocalyptic omens and numbed by reruns and reality TV, but still inexorably drawn to the possibility of redemption and recovered purity: “Clean now, never been so clean. God died a useful thing.” Running the gamut between fairy-tale characters and infamous killers, Hollywood icons and urban legends, Phantom Laundry also considers how the seemingly ordinary, apparently desolate life might be momentarily renewed thanks to the playful miracles of language: “What tenderness in smoothing over the delicacies, overalls and overnothing arguments.” With this, his second collection, Tyrell continues to make a name for himself as a strikingly original poet whose work blends comic word-play with haunting gravitas.

Michael Tyrell is the author of The Wanted (The National Poetry Review Press, 2012) and his poems have appeared in many magazines, including Agni, The Canary, Fogged Clarity, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). He teaches at New York University and resides in Brooklyn, where he was born.