Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He is the author of two poetry collections — River, Amen (Wayfarer Books, winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry) and Robbing the Pillars (Homebound Publications) — and his writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, Water~Stone Review, and North American Review. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best Spiritual Literature, and The Pushcart Prize. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and he believes every watershed should have a Poet Laureate.

Other poems on the web by Michael Garrigan:
"The River, a Mouth"
"Dead Elk Sleeps Next to a Decommissioned Nuclear Power Plant"
"Epistemology: Bullfrogs"

Michael Garrigan's Website.

About River, Amen:

"These poems pour and course, riffle, pool, and eddy. Garrigan is a poet alive to the mysteries of rivers, to dark days as well as light, to spirit and desire and human complication. 'We are,' he writes, 'maps of each other.' Like a mountain creek, this book sings."
—Joe Wilkins

"'The river sings most beautifully when you are there to listen,' Michael Garrigan tells us in the very first poem of River, Amen, and listen he does, show up he does, on every subsequent page, to examine and translate that song with skill and devotion. Like mountain streams coming together, Garrigan deftly braids the lenses of poet, prophet, and fisherman into a single singing thread. He takes to heart the words of that great acolyte of nature before him, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and lets what he looks hard at look hard back at him — and then at us, demanding our holy attention. Garrigan props open the window of his practice, a practice of worshiping the world and the word, of casting out in search of 'the balance of being' on the water and on the page. The result is this 'reclamation song,' a fierce, stirring, urgent, tender, visceral, much-needed book that calls like the voice in the wilderness, demanding that we save that which is still good, raw, and wild in our lives and in our selves."
—Corrie Williamson

"Like a true convert of nature and member of the church of possibility, Michael Garrigan's poems remain poised and present for the next fecund turn of heart and mind that waits around the bend. River, Amen is a fine and faithful book, tracking what could connect us across 'shared syllables of existence.'"
—Geffrey Davis