Our Brief & Earthly Inheritance: Two Poets on the Art of Making Do

Michael Hettich has published 11 previous full-length collections of poetry, including his most recent book, To Start an Orchard: Poems. He also has published several chapbooks and handmade books that incorporate art and poetry. His work has appeared in journals such as Orion, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Witness, and The Sun. His new book, The Mica Mine: Poems (St. Andrew’s University Press), was lauded by poet Richard Blanco as celebrating “the unspoken dialogues of the natural world with linguistic dexterity and fierce transformative details.” Poet Campbell McGrath observed that Hettich’s poems “resemble half-remembered fables or lyrical dreams, animistic dramas played out in moonlit meadows, domestic interiors that shimmer like velvet jewelry boxes.”

Jim Daniels is a writer and poet. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently The Middle Ages, Street Calligraphy, and Rowing Inland. His most recent books of stories are The Perp Walk and Eight Mile High. He also co-edited the anthology Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. The poems in Gun/Shy (Wayne State University Press) deal with the emotional weight of making do. Tinged with both the regrets and wisdom of aging, Daniels’ poems measure the wages of love in a changing world. He explores the effects of family work, and what is lost and gained in those exertions. He finds solace in small miracles – his mother stretching the budget to feed five children with “hamburger surprise” and potato skins, his children collecting stones and crabapples as if they were gold coins. His first long poem in many years, “Gun/Shy,” centers the book. Through the personas of several characters, Daniels dives into America’s gun culture and the violent gulf between the fearful and the feared.

Elisa Albo is a poet, educator, and the author of the chapbooks Passage to America and Each Day More. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Alimentum, Bomb Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, InterLitQ, MiPoesias, Notre Dame Review, and SWWIM Every Day, and in various anthologies, including Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents and Vinegar and Char. She is also an editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Harassment, Empowerment, and Healing, and is an associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal.