Books by Michele Glazer

Michele Glazer's poems take on questions of being and value, exploring not just "what" is, but "how" it is. The poems trouble borders--between self and other, old and young, sick and well, stranger and intimate; between physical states in processes of decay; and between line and phrase, sentence and interruption, prose and poem, resisting the desire for something irrefutable with an abiding skepticism. The poems are drawn to missteps in perception and in language, those fractures that promise to crack open a surface to yield some other, greater meaning: "What is looked at is changed / what is looked for is gone." From this collision of passion and severity come poems that are strange and darkly beautiful.

Here, the author confronts the slipperiness of language and perception as she probes natural processes - the lives of insects, the uncertainty of love and the deaths of human beings. The poems negotiate between desire for something irrefutable and an uneasy bedrock of paradox.