McDannold, Michele (2025). Collected Poems 2005-2025 (Poetry Collection) Roadside Press 279p. $20.00 (Paperback)
Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems 2005–2025 is a bruising, beautiful chronicle of two decades lived on the raw nerve of experience. The voice here is equal parts survivor, witness, and outlaw philosopher—one who has been scorched by the world’s indifference yet still refuses to turn away from its aching humanity.
From the early, hard-living urgency of pieces like “not recommended” and “monkey bars,” McDannold declares her allegiance to a poetics that bleeds and sweats rather than postures. “This poetry is not recommended for the high-brow sissified punk bitches,” she writes, and she means it. The poems reject the polite sanitization of language and experience in favor of a fiercely embodied truth: “we’ve got balls in our face and dirt in our shoes hot shit red blood cum stains on the inside pocket.” It’s an outlaw manifesto, one that echoes the rough-edged honesty of Bukowski and the moral reckoning of Diane di Prima.
Yet beneath the bravado and blue-collar grit, there’s a tenderness that keeps surfacing—often quietly, almost by accident. In “any day now” and “it’s not so bad,” the poet turns her gaze to the broken ordinary: the woman on the back steps without electricity, the extension cord looping over her head, the rabbits in the trash-lot cage. McDannold doesn’t romanticize these lives; she gives them their full measure of exhaustion and endurance. Her empathy isn’t sentimental—it’s rooted in recognition.
The West Coast Notebook series anchors the middle of the collection, chronicling McDannold’s move through Los Angeles and the mythic edge of America with the eye of a poet who has seen the whole ride from the ground up. These pieces—half travelogue, half elegy—trace a country fraying at its seams: “studies show even the helicopters are in on it.” Here, her humor turns darkly satirical, her tone wry and wise: “oh you writer people, aren’t you so cute with your angst & rebellion.” The “West Coast” poems record the geography of the lost—addicts, poets, and other dreamers trying to make rent and meaning in the same breath.
The later poems grow more introspective, haunted by love’s aftermath and the small devastations of aging. In “spacetime continuum for dummies,” memory collapses into grief with the disarming simplicity of someone too tired to lie anymore: “tick tick tick / in the morning we did not say goodbye.” Pieces like “simple question” and “the science of breaking up” show McDannold refining her raw voice into something crystalline and devastating.
The Prose Poems section — particularly “Dear Raving Lunatic” and “String Theory” –reveals another layer of her craft: surreal, expansive meditations where her working-class lyricism meets speculative metaphysics. Her prose is musical and jagged, filled with strange humor and melancholy wisdom.
Throughout, McDannold’s language is fearless. She writes with a directness that feels both confrontational and cleansing, like she’s trying to scrape the truth clean of artifice. There’s sex, madness, poverty, and longing — but always, always, an undercurrent of resilience.
Collected Poems 2005–2025 is not an easy book, nor should it be. It is a living document of a poet unafraid to look into the abyss and still find a way to laugh, love, and write it down. It belongs on the same shelf as Wanda Coleman, Lyn Lifshin, and Charles Bukowski — not as imitation, but as continuation.
Michele McDannold has written the kind of book that reminds us what poetry is for: to name the mess, to survive it, and to make something wild and human from the wreckage.
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While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
