Poets Wear Prada is a poetry publishing house with excellent poets and affordable books with beautiful covers. Have you had your poetry today?--Meredith Sue Willis, Books for Readers * * * Stylistically, these beautifully designed and produced chapbooks bear their own distinctive signature.--Linda Lerner, SMALL PRESS REVIEW

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Happy Valentine's Day! "The Slip" by Michael Montlack


The Slip
by Michael Montlack

Is it possible
to have been tattooed
by someone’s soul?

Only with eyes closed
can I trace outlines,
a slight raise on my unmarked skin
(even in creases: inner elbows,
between fingers and toes).
The designs always familiar
but too abstract to identify.

I mean, can one be widowed
by the living?

Carting the blank stone
from days into dreams
toward an open grave
in my front and back yards,
basement, bathtub.
Ever eluded by the body,
not the scent.

And if there is someone else one day,
will he sense this presence?

The fine slip beneath
my rumpled clothes.
The railing I reach for
even on shallow stairs.

Will you
be the mosquito netting
draping my honeymoon bed,
swaying almost imperceptibly in the dark
but allowing in breezes
that comb the hairs on my arms, 
legs, chest?


This Valentine's Day poetry selection, "The Slip" by Michael Montlack, is the the title poem of "The Slip," published by Poets Wear Prada in 2009.

2009 Releases
The Slip
by Michael Montlack
ISBN 978-0-9841844-2-2
Soft Cover, Saddle Stitched, 32 pp.
$10.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)
Release Date: October 2009
Perfect Bound Paperback Now Available at Amazon.com
List Price $10

http://amzn.to/eaV1i9
And on CreateSpace.com
https://www.createspace.com/3475987/

With pitch-perfect pacing and an intimate colloquial voice, THE SLIP reads as engagingly novelistic even as these memoiristic vignettes are untamed by wit and scathing humor. Ouch. The poems are at once revealing yet winningly imaginative as they reignite myth—there’s even a bisexual Orpheus here who helps Montlack to rewrite the past while instructing, bruising, and exposing suburbia’s lingering melancholy.
Peter Covino, author of Cut Off the Ears of Winter, winner of PEN/America Osterweil Prize


The many moods of THE SLIP, from fabulous to funny to frenetic, announce the arrival of a promising new voice that can express, with consummate sensitivity and verve, the sorrows and celebrations of our complicated queerness. When Michael Montlack writes, he can make us sing or break our hearts. Each poem is a veritable “kiss of the artist”—passionate and memorable.
Rigoberto González, author of Other Fugitives and Other Strangers


Michael Montlack's THE SLIP situates us in the middle of a life, threading together joys and sorrows. Some of the comic moments will truly make you laugh out loud. And at times, you'll get horribly wistful. Such is the richness of this collection.
D. A. Powell, author of Chronic
 




1 comment:

  1. Again, just a magnificent poem! I lover the line "Carting the blank stone from days into dreams." How many senses are engaged by this provocative line!

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