Michael P. Hill
Word Nerd
About
Michael P. Hill is the author of three collections of poetry: Where That Leaves Us (Kelsay Books, forthcoming 2024) Not Just Passing Through (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2022) and Junk Drawer (Kelsay Books, 2021), which was named an Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist. His poems have also appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Briar Cliff Review, Spillway, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Barstow & Grand, Opossum, Plainsongs, Jelly Bucket and Talking River Review, among others. Michael has worked as a journalist, toured and recorded with rock’n’roll bands, earned a Master’s degree in Library & Information Science, and wet a line in more rivers, lakes and streams than he can possibly remember. He grew up in Western Wisconsin and spent a number of years in both Texas and Washington before settling in Northern Colorado, where he lives with his wife Katheryn, their children Sawyer and Harmony, and their dogs Harold and River.
Books
Not Just Passing Through (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2022)
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"Quiet wonder and clear-eyed serenity flow through Michael P. Hill’s poems, which find the sacred in the everyday and the modest in the sacred: a stranger’s grief at the vet’s office; a fisherman’s view of a stalking heron; reflections on those who’ve left us. These are works in which simplicity is celebrated, experience vividly recalled, and the natural world impeccably observed, and all of them—all—are deeply felt. One of the particular joys of Hill’s work is his apparently effortless equanimity; he’s not seeking to reassure us—that would be cheap, egotistical—but that’s precisely what these poems do in their calm embrace of the complicated multivalence of these works-in-progress we call lives. The reader enters the river with its swirling, sun-dappled surface and its teeming life below, then reemerges feeling more connected to the earth, more appreciative of the limited time we have on it, and more connected to those with whom we share it. It’s a joy."
Doug Dorst, author of S., The Surf Guru and Alive in Necropolis