Description: Michael Shay's poems are about experience - landscape and family, family and love, love and death, death and memory, memory and renewal.
Brief description: Michael Shay was born in Germany and grew up in Chicago. At the University of Iowa he studied with Lousie Glück, was chosen to attend the summer session of the Iowa Graduate Poetry Workshop, and studied with Marvin Bell. He also holds a Master Of Creative Arts In Interdisciplinary and Experimental Art. Michael's work has appeared in literary journals including The South Carolina Review, Nimrod International Journal, Gobshite Quarterly, and Rhino. He was contributing editor to Broken Word: The Alberta St. Anthology, Volumes I and II. A commercial photographer, Michael also writes, delights in his grandchild, practices martial arts, brews his own beer, and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Review Quotes:
Michael Shay's The Words I Own is captivating. The poems are by turns playful and heartbreaking, the manner uncluttered, generous in its amicable approach to the reader. His writing carries the resonance of a life with which most readers will identify. The Words I Own, among its many virtues, is a good read. - Marvin Bell
Michael Shay's poetry whispers in the reader's ear that before we are "ready to drink with death/ He drinks with [us]." He understands the importance of rising each time we fall, the fusion of love and living. - Christopher Luna, author, Message From A Vessel In A Dream, editor of Ghost Town Poetry Volumes 1 & 2
Michael Shay's collection is a study in contrasts. Permanence and transience. Joy and sorrow. Stillness and frenzy. An ever-shifting kaleidoscope of experience and memory, these poems quietly but insistently conjure fragments of the poet's private world where, if a cross carried in the mind alone is a weight without conclusion, constant love also replenishes constant love. - Brenda Taulbee, author, The Art Of Waking Up