LETTING GRAVITY SPEAK by Erika Michael
$20.99
In Letting Gravity Speak, Erika Michael has strung fine lines to catch the gravitons of love. This stunning arrangement of poems captures and holds all the charges and contours of a great, long, complicated conjugal adventure—its vaults and plummets, its sensuous and heady immersions in wonders both outer and intimate, and, most significantly, that love’s antigravity persistence, even its intensification, through loss. Michael’s poems are elegant, bold, and sing in all the idioms of a remarkably full life. Fused here are art history, topology, street talk, Torah, deep ecology, the beloved’s brilliance, the fraying of memory, the erotic and the holy…all in a forcefield of relentless resilience that discovers joy again and again in the mystery and magnificence of the world.
–Jed Myers, author of Watching the Perseids and The Marriage of Space and Time
“Erika Michael’s debut collection is equal parts elegy and celebration, a book that bears witness to the loss of her beloved husband after nearly fifty years of marriage. We see two lives shaped by a curiosity that drove them to explore, from a train ride across the Pyrenees to the ‘coffee-dappled/ Danube,’ a curiosity that sustained Michael as she made a record of her husband’s final journey, from complex mathematical hypotheses to the halls of the memory care unit in which he struggled through his last days. In her grief, the world is described ‘as noiseless as our / kitchen in the morning without the clank / and hiss I crave, more silent than stones / that I’ve piled on your grave,’ yet we also watch her find her way back to wonder. Informed by Jewish prayers and practices, as well as the wisdom of a long life well-lived, these musical and searching poems exude vulnerability and dignity. Letting Gravity Speak exerts a gravity all its own.”
–Jessica Jacobs, author of Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going, and Pelvis With Distance and Nickole Brown, author of Sister, Fanny Says, and The Donkey Elegies
Description
LETTING GRAVITY SPEAK
by Erika Michael
$20.99, Full-length, paper
979-8-88838-182-3
2023
Erika Michael, a Seattle resident since 1966, received her Ph.D. in Art History from The University of Washington. She has participated in extended poetry workshops with Carolyn Forché, Thomas Lux, Linda Gregerson, Laure-Anne Bosselaar,Tim Siebles, Major Jackson, and Jeffrey Levine. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Cascade, Drash, Bracken Magazine, The Winter Anthology, Belletrist Magazine, The Dewdrop, Aletheia Literary Quarterly (Third Prize Finalist) and elsewhere. In 2019 she won first prize in the Ekphrastic Poetry Contest at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.
Katrina Gabelko –
Letting Gravity Speak by Erika Michael is a cohesive and empathic collection of epistolary(relating to the writing of letters) poems chronicling Michael’s life with her husband (mathematician Ernest Michael), her husband’s declining health, and ultimate death.
Throughout these letters (epistolary poems), written to her late husband, Michael demonstrates her unwavering commitment to life, family, joy, sorrow, triumph, grief, and, above all else, remembrance.
Michael’s purpose transcends the traditional literary
categories of informing, explaining or instructing, entertaining, or persuading. To say that the purpose of Michael’s collection is to “entertain” trivializes and minimizes the depth and beauty of her work. The notions of “informing” and “explaining” are apt in the strict sense of knowledge sharing, but neither captures the level of emotion her writing evokes. I would place Michael’s purpose in its own category, one of being, of maintaining an existence and a presence.
Michael’s poems are all interrelated, with multiple, complex ties; some concrete, some abstract; some subtle, some blatant. She frequently reminisces about a love of train travel which she shared with her husband: “As we share prime rib and berry pie with other track junkies in this majestic terrain…” ; “We’d just whizzed by, like the speed of our years.” Michael’s use of similes is frequent, clever, often witty, and on point. “Vienna’s Sachertorte, my birth city’s imperial go-to, like that ever-descending great wheel of Harry Lime renown”; “We… wait for the ferry to reach the pier, its legs creaky like ours…”
I was amazed by Michael’s ability to simultaneously communicate on so many different levels—much like the many layers that compose each of our lives. Her descriptions are vivid, relatable, and laden with emotion. Her work is densely packed with meaningful expressions. Of her husband’s experience in a nursing home, she writes: “The howl of loss, a puréed bite, a
crumb gone mystifyingly awry, then dread within the curtained cosmos of an ER,” portraying an accurate description of the emotions attached to the setting, not just the setting itself.
I’m thrilled to see Letting Gravity Speak in print, available to all who read to enrich their lives. Michael’s collection caused me to pause, to reflect to want to do better as a nurse, a person, and a Jew. Indeed, while I personally found great cultural significance in Michael’s work, I think its heart and soul will appeal to anyone in need of empathy and humanity.