Free Verse
Marsh River Editions

Catch and Release
Chasing Saturday Night
in search of "Green Dolphin Street"
Lines on Lake Winnebago
Loose Change
Mead
Saying Grace
Slightly Off Q
Something Near the Dance Floor
Waiting For Beethoven
Walnut from Waterloo

"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

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
University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Program in Creative Writing

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
Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, 2000 - 2004

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
Cup of Poems, The Wisconsin Academy Review

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&emdash;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
Judge of the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Contest, 2004