About Emu Blis

In his third collection, Michael Brosnan dissects and appraises, as with a surgeon’s scalpel or jeweler’s loupe, the concept of the sublime (“creature of mud and fog”): its guts and wonders, its flaws and majesty.… A passion project of sweeping scope and crisp wit, this book will engage any reader who’s ever been bewildered or frustrated or amazed by the ineffable grandeur of our beautiful, fractured, complicated world.

 —   Maggie Dietz, author of Perennial Fall, winner of the Jane Kenyon Award and the Grolier Book Prize


His language is a searchlight for poetry, constantly a renewal. Travel with these poems as you would a knowledgeable circumnavigator who uses all wits, instincts, histories, indicators, observance, and questions to discover what’s sublime about the human journey.

— Peter Money, author of American Drone: New and Select Poems



About Adrift

Over the last fifty years there has been plenty of poetry that flirts with trying to transform the miraculous, daunting everyday. And so much of it is unremarkable. It neither opens windows into new compelling worlds, teaches us something about ourselves, nor breaks any surfaces. Michael Brosnan, however, is a poet who just might break your heart, because his examinations of how the individual mind engages with what he describes succinctly as “the strange and ever-present present” are relevant, distinct, unforgettable. So many of the reveries and narratives among the poems in Adrift are trapdoors into emotional and philosophical spaces that bring the cosmic and quotidian closer together. Whether he’s weighing stardust or the “musical hits of 1972,” Pez or the “truth behind the Ascension,” Yoda or Springsteen, Brosnan is a shrewd, seductive observer, flirting with doom, mortality, “the searing knowledge of impermanence,” yes, but also deciphering a way to survive from the “hieroglyphics” of the natural world, “Some truth/about the art of living and perishing/in the flow of things.”

I love the poems in this book, would gladly remain adrift in the subtle music of their multifaceted lineation, their authentic undulating meditations on “the stubborn art of hope.”

— Ralph Sneeden, author of Surface Fugue and Evidence of the Journey





About The Sovereignty of the Accidental

“A stunning book — fresh as a crisp wind after days of sluggish weather. Poems which stir language, memory, momentary intense awareness, to give us back the bracing joy of clear thinking. Brosnan writes with a deft, sure hand. How can there be so much potent magic in a single stanza or phrase? It’s as if he found the pulse of poetry.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye 

Commuting both as teacher and as learner between worlds, Michael Brosnan maintains a fine balance — as open to the mundane troubles of a teenage student as to that “steady otherness of things” in the accidental world all around us. Keeping a kind of benign, never querulous, questioning mode as his compass and rudder, Brosnan, in this linguistically fresh collection, gently but firmly opens the universe of his own concerns to our understanding, and for our pleasure. His collection is one of palpable and impalpable presences — disparate, colorful, emotionally laden, always sharply apprehended: “the tongue of a vole. The trappings of desire,” or any “fleck of life/ in the fading light.” His is a voice of both musical and intellectual authority, and The Sovereignty of the Accidental is an impressive, deeply satisfying debut. 

— Eamon Grennan

“This book contains some of the best contemporary poetry I’ve come across. It has a lot of humor, honesty, deep thinking, real profundity. Wild creativity at times…. I felt like it was my first Aha! poetry moment with a contemporary in far too long. I’ve read it six times already, and still finding things. It’s a major cut above.”

— Goodreads review