Flies

Michael Dickman

Michael Dickman presents an uncompromising vision of joy and devastating loss in Flies, his second collection. Flies summons the wonder and alienation of childhood through a dreamy and exuberant surrealism, drawing on the paintings of Barnett Newman and the traditional Catholic Stations of the Cross as the poems grapple with the suicide of an older brother. Dickman’s work contemplates psychic, spiritual, and physical violence, unswervingly facing abandonment and transformation to arrive at regeneration and grace.

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ISBN: 9781556593772

Format: Paperback

From the Lives of My Friends

What are the birds called
in that neighborhood
The dogs
 
There were dogs flying
from branch to
branch
 
My friends and I climbed up the telephone poles to sit on the power
lines dressed like crows
 
Their voices sounded like lemons
 
They were a smooth sheet
They grew
 
black feathers
 
Not frightening at all
but beautiful shiny and
full of promise
 
What kind of light
 
is that?
 
                                  .
 
 
The lives of my friends spend all their time dying and coming
back and dying and coming back
 
They take a break in summer
to mow the piss
yellow lawns blazing
front and
back
 
There is no break in winter
 
I fell in love with the sisters of my friends
All that yellow hair!
Their arms
blazing
 
They lick their fingers
to wipe my face
clean
 
of everything
 
And I am glad
I am glad
I am
so glad
 
                     .
 
 
We will all be shipped away
in an icebox
with the one word            OYSTERS
painted on the outside
 
Left alone for once
 
None of my friends wrote novels or plays from the lives of my
friends came their lives
 
Here’s what we did
we played in the yard outside
after dinner
 
and then
we were shipped away
 
That was fast—
 
stuffed
with
 
lemons

About the Author

Michael Dickman is the author of four books from Copper Canyon Press: The End of the West, Flies (Winner of the 2010 James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets), 50 American Plays (with his twin brother Matthew Dickman), and Green Migraine. He has been profiled in The New Yorker and is on the faculty at Princeton University.

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Reviews

“Hilarity transfiguring all that dread, manic overflow of powerful feeling, zero at the bone—Flies renders its desolation with singular invention and focus and figuration: the making of these poems makes them exhilarating.” —Michael Ryan, judge of the James Laughlin Award, 2010

“Michael’s poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence.” —New Yorker