Letting Gravity Speak

In Letting Gravity Speak, Erika Michael has strung fine lines to catch the gravitons of love. This stunning arrangement of poems captures and holds all the charges and contours of a great, long, complicated conjugal adventure-its vaults and plummets, its sensuous and heady immersions in wonders both outer and intimate, and, most significantly, that love's antigravity persistence, even its intensification, through loss. Michael's poems are elegant, bold, and sing in all the idioms of a remarkably full life. Fused here are art history, topology, street talk, Torah, deep ecology, the beloved's brilliance, the fraying of memory, the erotic and the holy...all in a forcefield of relentless resilience that discovers joy again and again in the mystery and magnificence of the world.

-Jed Myers, author of Watching the Perseids and The Marriage of Space and Time



Erika Michael's debut collection is equal parts elegy and celebration, a book that bears witness to the loss of her beloved husband after nearly fifty years of marriage. We see two lives shaped by a curiosity that drove them to explore, from a train ride across the Pyrenees to the 'coffee-dappled/ Danube,' a curiosity that sustained Michael as she made a record of her husband's final journey, from complex mathematical hypotheses to the halls of the memory care unit in which he struggled through his last days. In her grief, the world is described 'as noiseless as our / kitchen in the morning without the clank / and hiss I crave, more silent than stones / that I've piled on your grave,' yet we also watch her find her way back to wonder. Informed by Jewish prayers and practices, as well as the wisdom of a long life well-lived, these musical and searching poems exude vulnerability and dignity. Letting Gravity Speak exerts a gravity all its own.

-Jessica Jacobs, author of Take Me With You, Wherever You're Going, and Pelvis With 

Distance and Nickole Brown, author of Sister, Fanny Says, and The Donkey Elegies