Michelle Boisseau is professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she also serves as associate editor of BkMk Press. She is the author of three books of poetry, No Private Life; Understory, winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize; and Trembling Air, a PEN USA finalist. She is coauthor of the popular book Writing Poems, now in its seventh edition.

Other poems by Michelle Boisseau in Verse Daily:
January 24, 2006:   "Pertinacious Seedheads" " Stuck on the side of the road..."
February 12, 2004:  "Potato Speculates on Popularity" "I don't want trouble, but the rutabagas..."
January 13, 2004:  "Sun Surveys Other Cynosures" "A cosmopolitan stuck in the sticks..."
December 17, 2003:  "Thorn Gets Theoretical" "You got it wrong. I'm no escort..."
December 10, 2003:  "Don't" "Along the furry case, the seams..."
January 31, 2003:  "Collect Call" "Whatever he means, my brother means no harm..."
January 7, 2003:  "Steadily" "In the sun-ladled spot we dug for it..."

Books by Michelle Boisseau:

Other poems on the web by Michelle Boisseau:
Five poems

About A Sunday in God-Years:

"A Sunday in God-Years is a fantastic book. Boisseau has composed a suite of historical poems set at the intersection of personal and collective life, a book in which private grief and public sorrow are different aspects of a single legacy, a legacy that’s both a privileged burden and a burdensome privilege, encompassing heart wrenching intimacy and cultural nightmare, the beauty of nature and the fragility of family bonds. In every line on every page of this beautiful and ambitious book, the present comprehends the past ‘the way the sidewalk burns hours after / the sun’s gone down.’ Unsentimental, stunningly alive in sound as well as sense, compassionate, unflinchingly honest, A Sunday in God-Years is a flat out wonderful book, one of the best I’ve read in years."
—Alan Shapiro

"“Even a ‘ragged chunk of limestone’ opens up expanses of geological, historical, and familial time in the artful hands of Michelle Boisseau, who revisits her slave-owning ancestry for a reckoning. . . . Her poems are a unique blend of sensuality, rue, fresh insight, engaging candor, anguish, wicked humor, taut lyricism and a pungent dash of caustic."
—Eleanor Wilner

"The title of this splendid book reflects the tonal complexity of these richly layered poems. . . . Boisseau sounds like nobody else and her vision demands our attention."
—Mark Jarman