Collected Poems 2005-2025
by Michele McDannold
Roadside Press
$20
Dec 6, 2025
Michele McDannold is one of the hardest-working women in the small press scene. She has established and continues maintenance of multiple imprints and websites. She’s driven across the Southwest and pacific Northwest distributing copies of books from the boot of her magical jeep like a postmodern book mobile. Her Collected Poems 2005–2025 consists of three separate collections—Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days (2014), Notes on the American Apocalypse (previously unpublished), By Plane, Train or Coincidence (2022) and a series of prose poems—is a healthy meal of hard-won insights rendered lyrically.
your ass has puckered
puckered so tight
you’ve just ingested your best whitie-tighties
cotton for air,
as the sweat comes pouring once
comes pouring forever
at night and forever. (105)
Her words are hard. The pain’s not easy. But that part of the meal is balanced by a reassuring wise-cracking compassion. The author writes with a squint, scanning the ground for remaining sprouts of live energy in the microwaved terrain, avoiding embellishment via metaphor or flights of abstract variations, eschewing the obfuscation in clear favor of the gritty facts of meaning. This vow is stated perhaps most explicitly in a poem called “I’m such an asshole” on page 40:
not in the kitchen
not on my way
out the door
not upon waking
goddammit
will I think of you
i will not write
any more
sickening
gay rainbowing
it up poems
only assholes do that
and more pedantically in one called “nothing to lose (or freedom)” on page 80:
the party is over/the beatniks are dead or dying/the outlaws are a joke/the wild west is tamed, my friends/rail against that which seeks to defeat you/every day/every hour/right now/get in your car/go/don’t kill the first thing that gets in your way/kill em all/kill em all/kill em all,/motherfuckers (80)
A mosaic of rough commentary from the bars and coffeehouses and clubs she’s worked in provides incidental background accompaniment to its central melody of dogged persistence in the face of disillusionment. All the cheap sex and lunacy and institutionalized poverty alongside the carefully arranged synchronicities of barrooms and coffee joints is counterbalanced by a strengthy devotion to the muse of making, a feeling known to every maker. It gives testimony to the amount of poetry available in the unexamined minutiae of experience.
Get your signed copy of Collected Poems 2005-2025 at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/mcdannold/JMDD4CUBDLEFXOYFSLSBIILG
Zack Kopp is co-creator of the monthly Coffeehouse for Social Medicine at Mutiny Information Café in Denver. All his books are available at Amazon. Find more of his writing (fact and fiction) at www.campelasticity.com
