The Wanted, Michael Tyrell's sharp-eyed, intellectually inventive,
playful, and darkly humorous first book, is filled with so many
wonderful and surprising ways of looking at familiar things that it
answers Stevens' dilemma about which to prefer-"The beauty of
inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes"-by preferring them both.
Tyrell expresses this preference by way of a patient and scrupulous
self-scrutiny, the kind he observes in Egon Schiele's
representation of trees in which the painter "looked at himself,
tore out the human, cleaved/ it into branches." So, too, Tyrell
looks at himself and cleaves the essential human matter of his
perceptions onto the provocative and often sinuous lines of his
verse. -Michael Collier Like the haunted, disconnected heads on a
wanted poster, Michael Tyrell's daring and fiercely intelligent
poems signify nothing less than the mystery of existence, the
relationship between how one is perceived to what one really is, if
such a thing were possible to express. To read these remarkable
poems is to enter the shadow world of the wanted, where every
surface is vulnerable to a violence, real or implied, that will
crack it open to reveal a secret code. A book of masks where the
disguised often forgets it wears the mask and the mask forgets it
is not the face, The Wanted invites us to "enter the wet bladed
edges/ which break us again into separate beings, / pour salt into
wherever we bleed." Enter with caution and be prepared to lose
yourself. -Henry Israeli In Michael Tyrell's The Wanted, the
images, techniques, and preoccupations of film noir permeate many
of the poems. There are references to crime scenes, acts of real
and imagined violence, missing children, lie detectors, forgeries,
guns, exit wounds, and much more. In "The Supporting Character,"
the poet writes, "The narration's unreliable./...I'm a subplot
about to unfold." All of this for good reason since Tyrell's
subject is essentially the unfathomability of identity and
selfhood-a mystery to be slowly puzzled at, unraveled, exposed.
Ultimately, the poet's evasions are the evasions and uncertainties
we experience in our everyday lives, both with ourselves and with
other people. The Wanted is a strange, disquieting book that
serious readers will keep returning to as they plumb the many
levels of these resonant, mysterious poems. -Elizabeth Spires
Michael Tyrell resides in Brooklyn, where he was born. His writing
has appeared in Agni, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New
York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and
many other magazines. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the
anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). He
teaches at New York University.
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