The Arsonist's Letters

<p>Comprised of poetry written over the course of more than two decades Michael Tyrell's The Arsonist's Letters reckons with a radically changing landscape where infestations of coincidence overlap with reflective / tricks and rungless ladders and increased surveillance meets the threat of looming extinction. Throughout memorable historical and contemporary figures emerge: a cousin mistaken for the abducted Lindbergh child; a boy who must make a bargain to keep from starving in Mussolini's Italy; children [...] / who swear live inside them /the entire populations of small countries. Including moving elegies for a dying mother and poems that puzzle over difficult family secrets the collection also stands as a paean to correspondence itself celebrating not only the near-lost art of letter writing but the spiritual necessity of the written message: You carry an unsent card in your coat like immunity papers/ from one ruined place to another / where it is at least somehow / always spring.</p>