is
the author of Conversations During Sleep (Anhinga Press), winner
of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and The Keeper of Light (Painted
Bride Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Series). Her poems have appeared widely
in literary journals, including Poetry, The Hudson Review, and
Boulevard, and anthologies, such as the award-winning When I
Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple. She has received an Anna Davidson
Rosenberg Award for poems on the Jewish experience and fellowships from
Yaddo, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts. A longtime New Yorker, she now writes and edits from her
home near Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband, a high school
science teacher.
Hear Michele read selected poems
Order Conversations During Sleep online
She recognizes
its crest in the way he looks at her.
The wave is as vast as the roiling mass in the Japanese
Print they had paused in front of at the museum,
Capped with ringlets of foam, all
surging
sinew.
That little village along the shore
would
be
Totally lost. There is no escaping
this.
The wave is flooding his heart,
And he is sending the flood
Her way. It rushes
Over
her.
Can you look
at one face
For the whole of a life?
Does the
moon peer down
At the tides and hunger for home?
—From Poetry, June 2001
"Does
it have a spine?" the
bookseller
Chided, reluctant to stock a collection
With less evident heft than its stonier kin.
"It
has a thin but determined spine,
Staple-bound," I replied. "It stands
On its own. And when you open it, its mottled
White wings will carry you, high on
that
spine,
Across echoing, dry-river canyons riddled
With petroglyphs, beyond hidden
cabins
Dotting tree-glutted mountaintops, a gray spired
City indulgent to street-corner marionettists
And blaring traffic that hugs the
square,
Until it lands you, past miles of sea as subtle
As twilight, upon your doorstep, with your
Heart wanting to open its spare
room
To strangers, everything crisp."
Anhinga Press
©
Michele Wolf
[Wolf's] lucid, passionate poems...are a welcome contribution
to the words that pass among us.
—ForeWord
Deft
complexes of sound.... Dozens of well-executed passages...and many finely
made, tough-minded poems.
—The Georgia Review
Winner
of the 1997 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, this volume introduces a warm and
inventive voice. —Independent Publisher