Guernica Editions

Michael Mirolla’s poetic world is one where a mirror — or any simple reflective item — is tilted ever so slightly, providing an opening to places we’d never imagined existed. (One of them is his own birth, from the inside, looking reluctantly out.) The poet is a metaphysical detective, finding the cracks and gashes that open into other worlds. Uncomfortable in the here and now, he’d rather spend time in the past/future, or on the edge of that mirror. Luckily for us, shaped by his reflective, polished imagery, all those worlds are fascinating places to visit, doing a brief meet-and-greet with his myriad ghosts. {Lindsay Brown}

Michael Mirolla looks into his art as into a language prism: light glances off many sides of the 'object' at once, and time, particularly time, is what attempts to hold it still. They seem to work as artistic principles, informing and revelatory: the condition and product of the work itself. But as time lets go, the poem is left not just as a brilliantly lightrefracted piece; it is also, in Stevens' parlance, that always perennially interesting 'world [that] lives as you live / Speaks as you speak,' the demystified thing as it is. We are not left with just a lovely inscrutable artifact but an image, as Bachelard says, that 'opens a future to language'. {Conrad DiDiodato}