Green Migraine

"Reading Michael [Dickman] is like stepping out of an overheated apartment building to be met, unexpectedly, by an exhilaratingly chill gust of wind."—The New Yorker

"These are lithe, seemingly effortless poems, poems whose strange affective power remains even after several readings."—The Believer

"My master plan is happiness," writes Michael Dickman in his wonderfully strange third book, Green Migraine. Here, imagination and reality swirl in the juxtaposition between beauty and violence in the natural world. Drawing inspiration from the verdant poetry of John Clare, Dickman uses hyper-real, dreamlike images to encapsulate, illustrate, and illuminate how we access internal and external landscapes. The result is nothing short of a fantastic, modern-day fairy tale.

From "Where We Live":

I used to live
in a mother now I live
in a sunflower

Blinded by the silverware

Blinded by the refrigerator

I sit on a sidewalk
in the sunflower and its yellow
downpour…

Michael Dickman is the winner of the 2010 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets for his second collection, Flies. His poems are regularly published in the New Yorker. He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and teaches poetry at Princeton University.