Marsh River Editions

Chasing Saturday

Night: Poems

About Rural

Wisconsin

by Michael

Kriesel

Michael Kriesel writes regional poetry of the most important kind, drawing on family and memory and a deep sense of place to evoke the region of rural Wisconsin, yes, but also the region of the mind, the soul, and the heart. With a seemingly effortless lyricism and narrative energy, these poems explore the gifts the world gives us, from a bee retrieving a little light from some marigolds, to a boy, fishing, and catching the sun. Whether writing of cutting firewood, making jam, baling hay, or shining deer, Kriesel finds the marvelous in the mundane, the dazzling in the diurnal, the eloquent in the everyday, in these affectionate and affecting poems.

Ron Wallace

Open your windows. Unlock the door. Michael Kriesel, a poet of eminent power and grace is coming up Countryside, right past Grampa's Old Place, and he's not alone. He's bringing The Trailer Court Ghost and Blackberry Echoes. Michael has an earthy appetite for probing the depth and breadth of the human spirit. Honest and wise, vivid and passionate, his poems are brave and wild-winged. Michael is a generous poet who gives us his family, his ancestors, and the world. Chasing Saturday Night is thoroughly satisfying, a shimmering gift not to be missed.

Ellen Kort

Hold on to your hats! Michael Kriesel is a "country slicker." Each of his deceptively simple-looking poems is a three-cushioned shot that nails the eight ball.

John Lehman

The unforced sincerity of Michael Kriesel's voice allows the complex components of his poems to combine into a deceptively simple authority. Spilled jam, the smell of matches, a sinister barn, an old man zipping up his pants—all these images are in the service of a larger scene and story, indeed a history which transcends the local, likable voice. These unpretentious, vivid poems have larger and lasting resonances: they linger in the memory.

Rachel Hadas

ISBN 978-0-9772768-0-6

Published 2005

39 pages, B&W photos

French flap outer wraps

$10

Three poems in the book were among five that won the

Lorine Niedecker Award.

Grape Jam

by Michael Kriesel

I was helping Grandma make grape jam

mostly I was helping her remember

what we'd done and what came next

sitting at the kitchen table

popping wild dark grapes

out of their slippery skins

adding sugar and Sure-Jell

cooking them so many minutes until

we poured the sticky darkness into jars

sitting on a breadboard

I'd take each batch into the living room

so Grandma'd have more room to work

setting the jars on a card table

by the TV to cool

the TV kept showing a tape loop

of two airplanes crashing into

buildings in New York

the bodies falling endlessly

the way we do in dreams

everything repeating

every time she heard the popping

of a metal lid announcing

that another jar had sealed

Grandma'd say

the Japs are bombing us again

her brother's death in World War Two

somewhere in the future

Normandy a funny word

nobody in Milwaukee knew

pouring the next to last batch

I told her this was different

but she said the dead

are just as dead

no matter what the TV says

then she turned the TV off

like God commanding darkness by remote

knocking a jar off the table by accident

both of us just sitting there a moment

watching darkness seep across the old linoleum

TO ORDER:

$10 plus $3 postage.

Send check, made out to Marsh River Editions, to:

Marsh River Editions

Linda Aschbrenner

M233 Marsh Road

Marshfield, WI 54449

Or print out our ORDER FORM (available on the Order Form page or as an Adobe PDF file) and mail it along with your payment.

Questions? Email:

wordzoo (at) dwave (dot) net

Thank you!