“I like being in the world of Michael Craig’s poems. Anything can happen, and probably will, and it will affect me in small or large ways that I couldn’t have imagined. The precision of their imagery keeps me reeling with delight.”
—James Tate
An isolate, protracted surrealism attaches languidly to objects, animals, and emotion in Michael Earl Craig’s poems of semi-rural outlandishness. Profundity takes its rightful place in the shallow arena: “You can’t step out of your tragedy, it wouldn’t be a tragedy./ Neither can I./ Together we walk/ and think thoughts in a cornfield./[ . . . ]/ A thing cries out from the interior of Corn.” The reader is embroiled in textural exposition, encountering dark recessions of realism against the relief of interior truth: “Today you strike me as needing something./ So take my ten-thousand-pound typewriter . . . / . . . For here is an older,/ other world, taking almost forty sheep to make one sock./ A serious mist fills my eye. You/ have made me cry.” Winsomely ominous vapors arise from the combustion of “dreamish, autobiographical thoughts” with their counterpart, the cosmic laughter provoked by close observation.
