Micah Ruelle is a queer educator, editor, writer, community art organizer, youth advocate, and poet from America’s Heartland. Their first chapbook, Failure to Merge, was published by Finishing Lines Press in 2019. You can learn more about them and their work at www.micahruelle.com
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PRAISE:
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Micah Ruelle’s Clean Getaway guides us through kitchen tableaux, raucous Pride night dance floors, Texas backroads, and beyond to honor what’s transformative within the messy, often temporary nature of romantic love. It explores what it means to be a feeling human animal often at the mercy of the “Moneypeople” of late capitalism. This is a collection of whole-hearted poems that “Praise the sun, the great bowl. / The great yawning lack, the ever-emptying cup.” Ruelle’s poems keep the engine running while they name and then release whatever has been othered inside and outside the self.
“I am really tired of trying/ to make this thing work” opens Micah Ruelle‘s passionately forthright Clean Getaway, the speaker taking us alongside the passages of tragedy and miracle, in which “I could only whimper gratitude/in a lose English” in the midst of finding “Armageddon arrived, heaven & hell/ in their final brawl.” Deeply personal and meticulously crafted, Ruelle’s poems capture what we often cannot answer but explore anyway, whether on a cargo ship “casting off from the dock/ you will never stand on” or from the vantage point of Texas’s Enchanted Rock. These are the necessary conversations we must have in times of no return, even when trapped and full of doubt, for the very reason “I always manage to start building a house outside the cave, just to be near you.”
Micah Ruelle’s smart and moving chapbook Clean Getaway is an exploration of how past relationships find form in narrative. And even though many of the situations the book recounts are, in their moments, emotionally difficult and complex, Clean Getaway finally serves as a profound assertion of value—since love is “origin,” since the past eventually becomes meaning, and since, above all else, there’s sustaining power in saying, “I was I was I was.”
–Wayne Miller
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