Nothing Remembers
Description
Beginning in Pompeii, Nothing Remembers visits the US Midwest and Jerusalem, where Michael Dickel (the author) now lives. The musical contemporary and at times jazzy experimental poetry re-members loss, relationship, and human connections with the world, while at the same time questioning the fallibility of memory and failure of poetry in undertaking such an endeavor. The poems engage geography and geology in the world(s) they inhabit. Ghosts people these places as palimpsests, while the poetry ranges through Kabbalah, philosophy, physics, and psychology. These poems dive deeper than confession or angst and avoid autobiography. Instead, they engage the heart, body, mind, and soul of the reader in their rich and often surrealistic imagery. They observe the full range of reality while reaching for acceptance, but do not despair. In the end, the poems suggest hope for human relationships and communication. There is, here, a deep love of the world below the surface
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About the Author
Reviews
Michael Dickel's title, Nothing Remembers, raises the question of whether the past can be preserved in memory, or whether memory is most effective in the face of loss. Either way, what does the past leave us, who are we with or without the past, and if poetry can occasionally fill gaps in our present, what if anything can it give us of our past? Is poetry anything at all--or is it nothing at all, and is the nothing of poetry the best memorialization? Dickel's sensory, sensual, musical lyric roves across wet and dry landscapes, food and drink, family and friends, darkness and light, sleep and wakefulness, dreams and reality. His words hover between his homes in the Mideast and the American Midwest, conveying the fragility of present and past, enacting a memory at high risk of loss, maintaining faith against staggering odds. Nothing Remembers is a dream of peace, the peace that may come if and when persons and peoples live in a present comfortable with close and distant memory.
--Hassan Melechy, author of Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory and A Modest Apocalypse
Michael Dickel combines powerful imagery and poetic beauty with a reality beneath life's skin, that will gently shake the reader into an awareness, refreshing and engaging. He will take you through his pages to a 'resting state' where possibilities in your mind will feel endless.
--Silva Merjanian, author of Rumors
Between knowing and dreaming, shattered screams, pulses, shadows and longing, Michael Dickel's arresting fourth collection, Nothing Remembers, navigates an erotics of re-membrance renegotiating a Proustian ethos of things resonant, prescient, and the ghostly revenance of hope.
--Adeena Karasick, author of Salomé Woman of Valor
I know so many wildly talented writers. It is one of the great privileges in my life. Michael Dickel is one of them: he uses language like layers of color in a complex painting--you can access experiences that you otherwise wouldn't have. Nothing Remembers, from Finishing Line Press; poetry lovers, this is worth having.
--Ina Roy-Faderman, author of 56 Days of August: an anthology of postcard poems