Kelly Michels

"This powerful little collection—essentially a meditation on reckless self-destruction—is painful and wonderful. Painful in the bone-aching witness of a child for her mother’s long, slow, determined collapse. Wonderful in the miraculous language that Kelly Michels has summoned to record the tortured love of mother and daughter."

--John Balaban, winner of the William Carlos Williams prize, the National Poetry Series, and twice finalist for the National Book Award.

Disquiet, ​Jacar Press 2015

"Kelly Michels is a brave and haunting poet whose deeply personal work creates what Stevens called “a new knowledge of reality.” Hard-eyed and large-hearted, rooted in her own past, Mother and Child with Flowers is a beautiful, terrifying, redemptive collection--a Madonna tableau woven from barbed wire and jeweled with broken glass."

--Tim McBride, author of The Manageable Cold

Mother and Child with Flowers, Finishing Line Press 2013

"The philosophy and emotional pulse moving behind the words—that and the flawless lineation of the music— just wouldn’t let me go."

--Jamaal May, Hum (Alice James Books) American Library Association Notable Book Award.