The End of Michelangelo

Dan Gerber 

Forthcoming October 2022

Reading the poetry of Dan Gerber, we are summoned to the larger truth: We are alive on a wondrous planet afflicted by human misuse. As T.H. White suggests, we can’t save the earth if we don’t savor it. In these poems, there is plenty to savor—the beauty of a face, the light falling on it—and plenty of terror, loss, and dread. The End of Michelangelo is the product of the fundamental human desire to make a Thing to hold experience even when we are no longer ourselves. Dan Gerber writes with a mind made new again, in poetry revivified by a late-life perspective.

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ISBN: 9781556596599

Format: Paperback

Artichoke

An interminable artichoke, Neruda
called his heart, and isn’t heart

a synecdoche for life, and
does not our life, at times,

seem endlessly enduring?
Until it doesn’t.

I may have been the only
kid in my Midwestern town to have

had intimate knowledge of an artichoke,
to have learned the patient pleasure

of peeling away fibrous leaves,
each only a tease for

the taste of the one to follow,
more ritual than meal,

keeping its reward just
out of reach, like foreplay,

each tooth-raked sample,
a little closer to the prize,

till, with a sharp-edged spoon, you
scrape the choke away and reveal

the purely-heart heart of a thistle
you’ve just destroyed.

About the Author

Dan Gerber is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoir. He has received the Society of Midland Authors Award, The Mark Twain Award, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year award in poetry, a Michigan Notable Book Award, the Michigan Author Award, and inclusion in The Best American Poetry, and American Life in Poetry.

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