Vacationland by Michael Lee Bross

In his collection Vacationland, Michael Bross takes the audience on a tour that spans decades, recalling memories such as his daughter mimicking animals or his father’s physical decline. After all, seated in a “beached boat at world’s end,” what else is there to do but look back? Bross demonstrates the importance of this reflection, even when—perhaps, especially when—it hurts like hell. Having seen this book in several iterations, I’m excited to soon see it out in the world!

–Michelle Greco, author of Field Guide to Fire

“So let’s pretend this all happened”. Let’s pretend our father had AIDS in Disneyland. Let’s pretend our Rush mixtape is playing in the 90s while our child “needed to touch everything” in Liberty Science Center and “my autopsy’s in the sand without witness”. And maybe we don’t need to pretend. Michael Bross brings us there, let’s us into his memory and his family and his fantasies not hiding the hurt or the fear. Vacationland is a powerful work that opens up over and over seeking a way or a place to be a family the right way.

–Fletch Fletcher, author of Existing Science

Michael Bross’s Vacationland collects memories of family vacations and excavates how these trips, swept “clean into picture frames,” are evidence of vacated life. Vacationland maps mourning in multiple layers: mourning a father lost to AIDS and then to death, mourning that “dying … is what we do / on vacation,” mourning how “answers murder the boundaries / of ourselves inch by inch into smaller universes,” mourning a boyhood lost to the apparent invulnerability of photographs. In some ways, Vacationland is an exploration of the lie of invulnerability and, by extension, the poison of toxic masculinity. But Bross also offers us a subtle counternarrative of hope, found in a deeply connected marriage to his spouse Adrienne, a profound and tender love for his daughter Ariadne, and a comfort, however hard won, that though “paradise is a race run in circles,” as he writes in the book’s opening poem, healing can be found in looking closely at the lies in our lives to find essential truths: even in snapshots, and definitely through poetry.

–Darla Himeles, author of Cleave