The Only Worlds We Know

Praise for The Only Worlds We Know

The Only Worlds We Know is, as Michael Lee writes, an “act of remembering like sharpening a blade until the blade is gone.” Memory is shaped with a resolve that is without resolution in these moving marvelous poems. They beautifully track what happens when unspeakable grief refuses to be silent . . . tender elegies blossom into resilient odes alerting us to the world.

– Terrance Hayes, National Book Award Winner, Lighthead

Michael Lee has found newly slanted and richly tinged ways to write about some of the crucial subjects – love and love lost, recovery and addiction, the bullet and the pill . . . His clean lines and nothing-to-hide voice will startle and edify his lucky readers.
– Billy Collins, author of Sailing Alone Around the Room

These are not easy poems, and Lee offers no easy solutions . . . Yes, there’s wreckage here, but also “words that carry us into the dark and then beyond it.” Indeed, these words will carry you. This is a striking debut collection – a voice that feels urgent, honest, and earned.

– Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzanines

Michael Lee’s debut collection, The Only World’s We Know is a compelling study of pain, addiction, trauma, and perdition. Pills, pipes, gurneys, knives, doors, keys, houses, and snow; all swirl in couplets, erasures, tercets, and dramatic monologues, to form a collection that captures a Minnesotan sense of north and the loss of youth. Shaped by memory, delivered with craft, both images and narratives blend to produce a eulogistic rural nostalgia . . . With craft and courage, Lee cracks the rock of memory, and his debut lets the light in. The Only Worlds We Know is a guide, a map, a lantern—bright with lamentation.

–  David Morgan O’Connor, Rhino Poetry