“I believe the desire to create pictures," David Hockney states, “lies deep within us." This sentiment is paired with the experience that most of us derive a deep pleasure in looking, beholding, and seeing. And in being seen, truly known. If nothing else, we are deeply visual creatures. Vision is a primary sense and a principal way of making sense of the world. How we picture is akin to how we perceive and interpret, determining the nature of our experiences and, therefore, the very quality of our lives. Hockney affirms that the history of making images is less about representation and more about how we see. In this collection of poems, Mickelson re-imagines what words a history of images contains and draws out the desire to be taken in whole and laid bare.
ALL THIS DIVIDE
"All This Divide" is both a reckoning—with the myths and violences of westward expansion, with the beautiful and ravaged landscapes of the American West, with the soul and soul’s ache for holiness—as well as an intimate, lyrical exploration of what remains of Stegner’s geography of hope, which includes, in Mickelson’s queer retelling, the hungering heart and the body of the beloved. I haven’t read a book as simultaneously fierce and lovely in a long, long time. - Joe Wilkins
WILDERNESS//KINGDOM
"Wilderness//Kingdom" is a sensual and poetic exploration of the West, the road, and the body. Spiritual and pastoral, this award-winning debut is not to be missed. Lyrical and startling, these poems conjure hunger and grace in equal measure that are intent on finding their place in the world.
SLOW DEPTH
“In winter, the land will forget I was here,” states Jory Mickelson’s narrator in his gorgeous collection SLOW DEPTH, but these plain-spoken, carefully crafted poems stand against that erasure by documenting a poets deep engagement with the physical world, by casting a line into the depths of what it means to be human, of what it means to be broken. Like all good poetry should, Mickelson’s skillful and tender poems reach “further/than what we can see or know.”
