At the Side of the Road: Poems

Previously published under the pen name Israfel Sivad.

A young man contemplating the weight of his world.

With these poems, Michael Anthony Adams, Jr. began his exploration into the variations of poetic form. He drew upon the inspiration of the masters of British and American poetry in order to begin his journey. By starting from the roots of Shakespeare, Donne, Poe, Whitman, and Eliot, he developed a style appropriate for the postmodern breakdown of structures.

These poems include Michael’s musings upon sonnet forms in A Moment’s Second, Light Seeps In, The Couple Passing By, and others. However, they also include works of extreme structural complexity like More Than Once, Imprisoned, and All We Ever See. Beginning with the simplest of schemata, it’s here that Michael first found “a form for truth that frees its beauty.”

Content Warning: drug use, violence