Michael Henry, author of No Stranger Than My Own

Talking Leaves…Books is pleased to welcome back to Buffalo area native Michael Henry, to read from and sign copies of his poetry collection, No Stranger Than My Own (Ghost Road Press), on Thursday, May 13, at 7 pm, at our Main Street store. The reading is free and open to the public—copies of Mr. Henry’s book will be available for purchase.

No Stranger Than My Own was published in 2008, with this descriptive note from the publisher:

Michael J. Henry’s poems reveal the tensions between the physical body and the psychology of attachment. Alternating from quiet odes and memomoria to the whimsy of ordinary daily experiences like swim meets and tattoos, Henry’s work picks away at our corners, revealing the blood and bone beneath. His world spins from delight to regret; he deconstructs Elvis into ekphrasis, and he carefully examines how time flits and love can evaporate. The body is not permanent in Henry’s view, but the elements of human consciousness are as real as bone, where ”...my will is a skeleton bound/by silver twine…” and “[Edward Hopper’s] shoes wear down and down…”

Eli Gottlieb, author of Now You See Him and The Boy Who Went Away has this to say:

Michael Henry's poems are a skilled, luminous negotiation with the surfaces of life and the shapes of memory. A supple writer, equally at home in elegiac as he is in lyric modes, he produces a beautiful fresh music by working the ground where tenderness and rigor meet. His poems, shot through with feeling and perfectly crafted, are as happy sounding the dark classical themes of poetry as they are finding the saving glisten of the everyday.

Michael J. Henry currently serves as Executive Director of Lighthouse Writers Workshop, a nationally recognized independent creative writing program in Denver, Colorado, where he also teaches poetry and memoir and essay workshops. A former recipient of a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship and a Platte Forum Fellowship, his work has appeared in such places as Copper Nickel, Threepenny Review, 5280, Pleiades, Rio Grande Review, Georgetown Review, and Bloomsbury Review. In 2008 and 2009, he collaborated with Ballet Nouveau Colorado to create two ballets, both set to poetry, entitled When the Power Goes Out and Intersection.

Michael grew up in Buffalo, New York, received a BA in English from University of Rochester and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. In 1997, he co-founded Lighthouse with Andrea Dupree, who serves as program director.