The End of Michelangelo

Dan Gerber 

Forthcoming October 2022

Derek Walcott has written, “It is the fate of poetry to fall in love with the world, in spite of history.” In The End of Michelangelo, Dan Gerber’s poems remind us that the very fact of being alive—of experiencing our fleeting, fragile, existence—is our only source of joy, our only avenue of consolation and compassion.  These poems of late-life experience wake us up, revivify our existence, and nurture our desire to go on living, despite our times, to counter our times, to open ourselves to both beauty and terror, and to Rilke’s reminder that, “No feeling is final.”
 

Paperback: $17.00 list price

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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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