Poetry
Poetry Videos | Read Poetry Online
SLEEPING AS FAST AS I CAN
Poems by Richard Michelson
Published: April 18th, 2023
Slant Books
With clarity and wit their honesty touches deep into pain: … of contemporary history, of Jewish life, of Jewish history, of the violence that spoils it all. But then come the words of blessing in the midst of the dark that understands “Light is our only future.”
-Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022
MORE MONEY THAN GOD
Poems by Richard Michelson
Published: Februay 2015
Pitt Poetry Series
University of Pittsburgh Press
Dazzling, smart, and original, More Money than God mixes up the angels and devils of history and hope into realms of greater being. There’s something huge going on nearly all the time—as well as something intricately tender too.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
BATTLES & LULLABIES
Poems by Richard Michelson
Published: January 2006
Illinois Poetry Series
University of Illinois Press
“Life is not poetry,” says an old woman in Richard Michelson’s Battles and Lullabies. The poems of this book ask with urgent eloquence how the sweetness of life can be sheltered from the terrors of our time, and what art can make of such a world as ours. Michelson’s poems are artful, humane and true.
—Richard Wilbur, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
MASKS
Poems by Richard Michelson
Illustrations by Leonard Baskin
Published: Spring 1999
The Gehenna Press
Fine Press Book, Edition of 26 copies.
This grand folio… continues Baskin’s keen interest in the grotesque; Michelson’s acute perceptions and descriptions acknowledge his concern with the disfamiliar & the unknown. The 24 etchings… reveal Baskin and Michelson probing at the fanciful, dissecting the imaginary, and obsessing over masks of great diversity.
TAP DANCING FOR THE RELATIVES
Poems by Richard Michelson
Illustrations by Barry Moser
Published: November 1985
University of Central Florida Press
Hardcover
Tap Dancing for the Relatives goes beyond the personal while carrying a lush family history in its wake; there is humor and craft and one leaves Michelson’s work feeling glad, not only to be alive, but to be alive with his words and characters dancing across the mind’s eye.
—Roger Weingarten
Richard Michelson is the author of three full length poetry collections, and two limited edition fine press books, illustrated by the artist Leonard Baskin. His poetry has been published in many major anthologies, among them The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, Unsettling America: Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, Men of Our Time: Male Poetry in Contemporary America and more than a dozen other compilations. Recent poems have appeared in The Harvard Review, The Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Parnassus, Image, Moment Magazine, The Southern Review, Jewish Currents, South Carolina Review, Mount Hope, The Common, Post Road, and Tikkun.
Michelson hosts Northampton Poetry Radio, and served two terms as Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. Clemson University named Michelson their R. J. Calhoun Distinguished Reader in American Literature in 2008. He is the recipient of a 2016 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and More Money than God was a finalist for the 2016 Paterson Prize.