We are very proud to announce that Michael Lynch’s Underlife and Portico has been awarded the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award by the New England Poetry Club. This is a great honor and we sincerely appreciate the recognition for Michael’s work from the NEPC and judge, Mary Buchinger Bodwell.
We hope you’ll join us tonight at 7pm at Brookline Booksmith to celebrate the release of Michael Lynch’s Underlife and Portico. Michael will be reading alongside Nicole Terez Dutton and Erica Anzalone. You definitely don’t want to miss this!
What are you doing May 31?
A poetry reading? That’s cool. Which one?
Oh, you’re going to Brookline Booksmith to celebrate the release of Underlife and Portico (2nd ed)?
That’s great! We love Brookline Booksmith!
See you there!
Jordan Sanderson has written an insightful review of the second edition of Underlife and Portico at Heavy Feather Review. An excerpt:
Sensual and visceral, Lynch’s poems are “heavy near bursting.” They recognize but see through the ennui of suburban life, and they unveil a natural world in which we see “[t]he rhyming color of lip and areole,” “night’s starred cartwheel,” and “alleys of sunlight.”
We’re ecstatic about this book (and these words). We think you will be too:
“Michael Lynch’s poems are pure vision: language becoming image becoming language again. This is a book of poetry you’ll return to as many times as God has names.” — Rusty Barnes
“These fresh, lively poems, with their playfully sexy turns of phrase (“beestung or g-strung”)—surprisingly poignant (and poignantly surprising)—are a pleasure to read. Just look at “Substantial Fascinators,” a wonderfully original love poem, where for a moment we can forgive even monsters when we remember that there was once a time when they too, like other people we loved, wore flowers in their hair.” — Lloyd Schwartz
Order your copy today!
We’re uber-busy, gearing up for apt’s third print annual, but we’ve never been big fans of free time, so we’re also working on the second edition of Michael Lynch’s chapbook, Underlife and Portico, which will be ready just in time for AWP!
We think Christopher Frost (of Neon) distilled what we love most about the book, and not just because he uses the word apt: “The images are familiar, even friendly: a bowl of oranges on the counter, a cafe, hedgerows and Reader’s Digest. But there’s also another side to this set of twenty poems, in which these ordinary objects and scenes are underlined with a quiet and oppressive darkness. In this way the title of the collection is particularly apt. There’s the beauty of the portico, and the little-seen underlife with all its seething, quiet shadow. The two elements meld perfectly throughout, each balancing the other.”
You can pre-order a copy of Underlife and Portico here and, if you’re coming to Boston for AWP, stop by table M4 at 2pm on Saturday, March 9, when Michael will be there signing copies of the new edition!
The editors of Neon weigh in on Underlife and Portico:
“In his writing Lynch displays a fantastic eye for detail, constantly throwing out quirky yet effective descriptions which surprise both with their use of language and their wonderful solidity… It’s a wonderfully smart collection, where not only are the individual poems insightful and well-constructed, but the collection as a whole is itself an elegant model of mundanity and the underlife that lies beneath.”
Read the full review here. And when you’re done, buy the book here.