REFUGEE

<p>In <strong>Erika Michael</strong>'s impressive book <em>Refugee</em> she does more than memorialize her family's persecution in Austria for their Jewish faith. While Refugee shows the tremendous loss brutality and injustice of it all-the poems also bear witness to moments of resilience and joy. While the book itself raises questions of memories and their allusiveness what is never in question is the truth of feeling surrounding those memories. <em>Refugee </em>blends oral history songs and family archival detail to such a degree that readers will feel transported to the locale of each poem. The result is a tremendous accomplishment of faith memory and lyricism. </p><p>-Charlotte Pence Mobile Poet Laureate and author of <em>Code </em></p><p></p><p></p><p><strong>Erika Michael</strong>'s <em>Refugee </em>ushers us into a Jewish early childhood in Vienna as the Third Reich rises and takes hold. Her poems then carry us west to new beginnings that millions would never access. We're drawn by her pulsing music of necessity on through a life imbued with gratitude and a keen feeling of the miraculous. The senses are alive in these poems of moments that might easily have never been.<em> Refugee</em> bristles with the utter unlikelihood of a family's American life. <strong>Erika Michael</strong> shabby kid with memories of flight renders a destroyed world breathing laughing murmuring prayers passed down centuries...reminding us love survives the forces of annihilation. </p><p><strong>-</strong>Jed Myers author of <em>Learning to Hold </em>and <em>The Marriage of Space and Time</em></p><p></p><p></p>