Pacific Power & Light

“This riot of nature, always troubled by the artificial, conjures a green thought in a green shade. Only in Dickman’s landscape, nature’s green spectrum turns corrosive, and veers towards a shade that glares and discomfits. No one sees and hears the world quite like this poet whose every line thrums with specificity.” —Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Roman Stories
 
“‘Motion sensor in the primrose’ captures both Michael Dickman’s capitulation to our ghastly modern world and his nostalgia for the civilised past. Home is the place he sees through a maelstrom of drugs, a place where his mother’s dogs’ paws ‘are formal and cross at the ankle’, where ‘the driveways here are very short and end in elegy.’ Like Rilke’s ‘You must change your life,’ Dickman abruptly announces, ‘I have wasted so much time.’ These poems are full of lovely domestic memories seen through greasy clouds of methadone. ‘It’s half you and half me,’ the poet tells us generously.” —Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover
 
“Michael Dickman’s Pacific Power & Light possesses a cumulative effect where small, fragmented moments culminate. The title works on the reader’s psyche as a subplot; yes, we remember what happened in Paradise and Dixie. The poet names seemingly routine moments of everyday lives, but the astute reader knows these collective details linger in the heart of America. The poet’s imagistic symbols and emblems create a postmodern intrigue, as one stands in daily humdrum. Dickman paints a portrait—moments that make us happy or sad—beckoning us into a psychological weather. Pacific Power & Light’s knowing ellipses color a fiery backdrop.” —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth