In the Bone-Cracking Cold
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the least-populated region in the lower 48. Walking a riverbank, you are more likely to meet a black bear, wolf, bobcat, or whitetail deer than you are a human—which is why M. Bartley Seigel calls the UP home. He is attuned to awareness and observation and the communication styles of the owl and moose. His poetry evinces Lake Superior whitecaps. An Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, Seigel teaches at Houghton’s Michigan Technological University.
BROKEN CARTOGRAPHIES
We mark our maps in musk, dust, woodsmoke, and urine, disoriented to the polar star.
We stumble into our open topographies in a rage that won’t kindle, won’t burn, our oxidation too slow for the tasks at hand.
We move through the landscapes as if we weren’t born to them, as if these hills and valleys weren’t our very own, as if we were lost and might never be found.
Reviewed by
Matt Sutherland
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