Michael Dickman

The award-winning poet returns to his homeplace in the Pacific Northwest, where the neighborhood simmers with the chemical presence of human trouble and sparks of beauty coexist with danger.

This image-driven, sound-driven collection carries us to the working-class Portland neighborhood of Lents, where Dickman was raised by a single mother. Here, as a skateboarding boy practices his kickflip on the street, enlightenment simmers under the surface of both the natural world and the human constructions that threaten it. The rivers shrinking to a trickle, the unaddressed crisis of homelessness, the drug use in a local these run side by side with the efforts and structures of families, created mostly by working mothers, with their jumbled bottomless purses and full-time jobs; Dickman’s own mother worked at the power company of the title, PP&L. His exquisite, ultrareal narratives take us down through these layers, illuminating the way we’ve treated and should treat one another, seeking integrity and understanding in the midst of a broken world.

Poems

Pacific Power & Light

Green Migraine

Flies

The  end of the west

Poems describe growing up in the American West and life in a troubled family.

The End of the West

An exhilarating and far-ranging meditation on days and how we live in them in the twenty-first century, from the award-winning poet. Michael Dickman's intuitive, agile verse captures us in its unusual pulse. Image-driven and shape-driven, the poems of Days & Days touch on parenthood, childhood, local natural habitats, graffiti culture, roses, and romantic love. Dickman considers both the internal and external vistas that open before him in the course of a day, the memories and the immediate quandaries. The long centerpiece poem, "Lakes Rivers Streams," is a reverie that picks up the flotsam of parenting days on its current. Other poems account for hotel days, or days spent watching TV, taking prescription drugs, watching butterflies. Throughout, we feel the dazzling originality of Dickman's awareness; he meets the brutality, banality, and strange beauty of the quotidian with a level gaze, and with an urgent musicality that carries us beyond these lines and pages.

Days & Days

Matthew Dickman

"Their verse . . . is strikingly different. Michael's poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew's are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality." —The New Yorker Identical twins Michael and Matthew Dickman once invented their own language. Now they have invented an exhilarating book of poem-plays about the fifty states. Pointed, comic, and surreal, these one-page vignettes feature unusual staging and an eclectic cast of characters—landforms, lobsters, and historical figures including Duke Ellington, Sacajawea, Judy Garland, and Kenneth Koch, the avant-garde spirit informing this book introduced by playwright John Guare. "Lucky in Kansas" Judy Garland: This is always the worst part Tin Man: The coming back Judy Garland: Yes, it fucking sucks, it's depressing as shit The Lion: Well, we're lucky to still be employed at this farm Straw Man: I wouldn't call it lucky The Lion: We were lucky to get back Straw Man: That's not really lucky either I don't think you know what lucky means Judy Garland: It's funny what you miss Tin Man: The running Judy Garland: The flying Tin Man: The flying monkeys Judy Garland: The beautiful flying monkeys above the endless emeralds the unbelievably green world Michael Dickman and Matthew Dickman are identical twins who were born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Michael received the 2010 James Laughlin Award for his second collection Flies (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Matthew won the prestigious APR/Honickman Award for his debut volume, All-American Poem.

50 American Plays (Poems)

Profiled in The New Yorker, this debut marks a talent to watch for years to come.

Michael Dickman

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