This Is Still Life: Poems: 8 (Mineral Point Poetry)

An anthem against apathy --Amelia Martens author of The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a MoatRead Tracy Mishkins poems as an antidote to the meat wheel full of teeth that is the contemporary news cycle. Not because this dangerously clever collection soothes or because it provides comfort but because these lyrics are urgent without shallow or callous bids for the readers attention and instead render the heartbreak of America as gorgeously as an old masters Vanitas--its the beauty of the poems that provides hope even as the menace of the grinning skull cannot.This Is Still Life fully invests in the double meaning of the title as it uses the dirty minutia of domestic life to symbolically stand in for our ruin while pointing to how the sunlight gilds the dirt so sweetly we cant help but get up again in the morning. Talk radio speak / to my heart of all that I have lost Mishkins speaker prays and we find ourselves praying too while the poems work polish into our hope.