Synopses & Reviews
The trees in Michael Shay's garden argue. Despite their moss his garden ornaments remain defiantly unnatural. Michael Shay's work is about experience: home and landscape and family, love and death and memory. It's about falling short and unselfconscious altruism; it describes the weather of the world and self. His clouds are clouds and his rain, rain. But his clouds and rain and summers and autumns are also about renewal.
Description
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 of 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 of The Art Of Waking Up