Michelle Menting is the author of the chapbooks Myth of Solitude (Imaginary Friend Press, 2013) and Residence Time (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in The Southeast Review, Diagram, Harpur Palate, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her work has also been featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry series. She is the recipient of awards from Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf-Orion Writers' Conference, Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology Hill House Artist Residency program, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and the National Park Service Artist-in-Residence program where she served as poet-in-residence on Isle Royale National Park. An avid trail runner and lake swimmer, she lives in Maine. Leaves Surface Like Skin is her debut full-length collection.

Books by Michelle Menting:

Other poems on the web by Michelle Menting:
"Objects Used to Prop Open a Window"
Two poems
"Now All Is Echo"
"Homecoming"
"Minnesota"
"To Skin Bare"
"Upon Encountering in the Woods, the House..."
"About Tardigrades"
"Effigy Mounds (a poem of breasts"
"Sky Writing"
"To Fell Roaches "
"Blue Herons"

*Michelle Menting's Website.

About Leaves Surface Like Skin:

"Michelle Menting is a poet of place. In her poems we meet newcomers to prairies and cornfields and women longing for the calls of loons. They live in a cropland for longing, rooted in 'Land we did not own but that owned / our souls in its soil.' Here we are introduced to the girl rural and quiet, scuffing messages to beings flying overhead. How lucky we are to read these poems, these rich and musical words."
—Peggy Shumaker

"In Leaves Surface Like Skin, Michelle Menting articulates gorgeous, strange visions of nature inflected by human interference. A forest is interrupted by a graveyard of Bob's Big Boy statuettes; ruling cockroaches populate a nuclear fall-out film; lichen becomes litter; a horse and farrier practice their choreography, as he 'let[s] her lean on him, her hips cocked, almost delicate.' These poems teem with litany, landscape, literal and figurative image; an awareness of mortality hovers, not so much afterlife as underlife. Menting has a gift for moody and luminous phrasing: 'For some, the world is wood tick wicked.' There’s magic to a collection that does such heavy lifting with a light touch."
—Sandra Beasley

"Michelle Menting's poetry boasts that enviable combination of fierce intelligence and power. She writes poems about the way we remember the rituals of a society that continue to mystify. And yet she manages to produce such brilliantly inventive phrases like 'the hunters hostel' ('we know its tradition/ we know they say it is'). At times her poems explore violence and trauma, but when they do, it is without sensationalism; and if there is alarm, it is the kind that settles on us with the inevitability of our human and necessary impulses. There is no flashiness to her verse. But there is plenty of craft, plenty of mannered understanding, and blessedly, plenty of heart."
—Kwame Dawes