The Way Home
- ISBN-10
- 0692565485
- ISBN-13
- 9780692565483
- Series
- The Way Home
- Pages
- 64
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2015-11-25
- Author
- Michael Morical
Description
In The Way Home, Michael Morical is equally at ease drawing on the poetic and cultural traditions of East and West. Whether he is celebrating "the evanescence / of a rusty strip mall" in the USA, or the "used power tools ... Confucian classics / and plastic ducks" in a Taiwanese night market, he gives each the full attention of his brisk curiosity, quick mind, and light touch. These poems suggest that "home" cannot be a static place - but is instead, a perpetually shifting balancing act between what erodes and what endures. It can be lost and found again in a moment "where everything missing fits/ and the song passes through my hands / until I name it." -Elaine Equi Many of these poems bridge climes and cultures, with a skilled observer's eye that illuminates ephemeral moments whether in a supermarket or a Calcutta car wash presenting us not with solutions or moral conclusions but with an open road to our own thoughts. Others track, often with wry humor, the failure of relations whether between a man and a woman or a father and a son. Always they are executed with an acute sense of the ability of language to light harshly or dim to softness the emphasis of emotion. Into this mix Morical stirs imagery that pushes his work toward the surreal. -Karen Swenson "I hold what's missing," Michael Morical writes in a poem about his father pushing his Pinto off a bridge, and proclaiming: "No tune ups, no breakdowns, no insurance." Morical's poems exist in transit from one end of the earth to the other, in motion toward an ending glimpsed through gaps and recesses, rearview mirrors and MRI slides. The body watches itself falter and fail, and laughs, like Morical's father, "through a head of missing teeth." Whether shopping for a list of "mushrooms, Drano, mousetrap and thyme" in a Midwestern supermarket, or strolling down a lane of "tapioca tea, used power tools, / grilled giblets, Confucian classics / and plastic ducks" in Taiwan, Morical's lyrically laconic speaker moves from inventory to invention, rendering the everyday world in odd and startling detail. At once humble and humbling, these poems mine the profound from the mundane. -Hilary Sideris
