Poetry Collections

Gembox

Winner of the 2018 Washington Prize from The Word Works.

“Lift the lid on Gembox and discover inside vast, sometimes terrifying worlds. Here is the buzzing of human activity, as if seen from high above. And here are more magical boxes, each a portal to new understanding. Michals writes with grace, wit, and the kind of eye that discovers in the everyday the marvels of a world we half recognize set against the echoes of our own mortality.” —Kevin Prufer, author of seven books of poetry and the editor of numerous anthologies, the most recent of which are How He Loved Them (Four Way Books, 2018), Churches (Four Way Books, 2014), In a Beautiful Country (Four Way Books, 2011).

Come Down to Earth

Winner of the 2012 May Sarton Prize from Bauhan Press

“Nils Michals is alternately healed and wounded by the tension between the timeless machinations of humankind and the modern machinery that lifts us beyond—and plunges us back to—our all-too-human, earthly selves.” —Alice Fogel, New Hampshire Poet Laureate, and author of Strange Terrain: A Poetry Handbook for The Reluctant Reader and Be That Empty

Lure

Winner of the 2004 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize from Pleiades Press

“Nils Michals has a marvelous knack for putting unexpected words in unexpected places—and for composing whole poems of such surprises. In these dense, rich lyric poems, he touches a wide range from the mythical to the quotidian with the same gleamingly precise sensibility. This is a striking collection that’s not afraid of beauty or emotion—nor of the difficulties they have always presented to poetry.” —Cole Swensen, author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017) and Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and a volume of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise (University of Michigan, 2011).

Room

Sting & Honey Press

“Nils Michals’ Room is a luminous and shifty meditation on image and interiority, private and public. In here, glossy surfaces and temporal detritus—Legos, monster trucks, grande lattes, yoga pants—push up against fragmentary moments where the poems assure us we can retain our essential selves, our sense-memories, and our metaphysical rooms “reminiscent of everything unremembered.” Lush, evocative, and often funny, these poems plumb, skirt, and record ‘how we feel / about remaining intact— / a particular quality of the light.’” —Erika Meitner, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and author of five books of poetry, including Holy Moly Carry Me, Copia, and Ideal Cities.