Michael Collier's The Ledge was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Other poems by Michael Collier in Verse Daily:

Books by Michael Collier:

Other poems on the web by Michael Collier:
Three poems
Fifteen poems
Five poems
"Shelley's Guitar"
Three poems

Michael Collier's Blog.

Michael Collier's Website.

Michael Collier According to Wikipedia.

Michael Collier on Twitter.

About An Individual History:

"With music, time, and a sheer narrative braver these poems find their path to an almost secret place, where history and memory meet. These are poems of family, of lost love, of citizenry and ancestry. What is so compelling is to see how art never abandons insistence here and how masterful the craft with which Michael Collier effects the introduction between the dreams of history and the nightmares of private loss. This is a wonderful, haunting collection."
—Eavan Boland

"Near the center of Michael Collier's masterful An Individual History is the ambitious, intricately constructed long poem, 'History,' positioned to reflect the brilliance of the personal and familial histories that surround it. Reading them, we are drawn into a lyric/narrative world wholly strange and yet, astonishingly, known once again, dense with the lucid mysteries that only poetry of an extremely high order can embody. Such is the singular artistry of Michael Collier and the very rare achievement of An Individual History."
—B. H. Fairchild