In Michael Earl Craig’s sixth book, poems resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar. Whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the “Italy of God,� or the milking rituals in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, Iggy Horse is a book that articulates the sadness and strangeness of American life with the poetic observations of true satire.

With his fifth collection of poems, Michael Earl Craig delivers a fresh set of tableaux that have us squinting aslant at the ordinary. Dexterously constructed, the scenes, conversations, letters, instructions, stories, bios, and little fables of Woods and Clouds Interchangeable twist the comedic into shapes of startling seriousness, making us laugh at the same time they widen the dimensions of the world we live in.

"Reality may be stranger than fiction, but Michael Earl Craig's poems make a laudable effort to even the score. Quite possibly the funniest poet writing today, Craig's unadorned poetry tends toward the deadpan and the offbeat, with an almost David Lynch-like sense of the uncanny."--"The Believer"

"I like being in the world of Michael Craig's poems. Anything can happen, and probably will, and it will affect me in small or large ways that I couldn't have imagined. The precision of their imagery keeps me reeling with delight."--James Tate

Michael Earl Craig furthers his existential, Lynchian leanings with masterfully composed new poems. He has borrowed the everyday and returned it defamiliarized, dark, and droll. Readers are ushered out of their contemporary bustle and into the intimate viewing room that is Craig's cinematic fourth collection.

Wild for the Lord: "

Someone is sitting on a tall stool before me.

I have just very carefully cut
my best friend's wife's bangs.

My watch feels like a small corpse on my wrist tonight."

Michael Earl Craig is the author of "Thin Kimono," "Yes, Master," "Can You Relax in My House," and the chapbook "Jombang Jet." He lives in the Shields Valley, near Livingston, Montana.

In Michael Earl Craig’s sixth book, poems resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar. Whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the “Italy of God,� or the milking rituals in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, Iggy Horse is a book that articulates the sadness and strangeness of American life with the poetic observations of true satire.