Gembox

About Nils Michals

Nils Michals is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Lure(Pleiades, 2004) and Come Down to Earth (Bauhan, 2014). Recent work has appeared in [PANK], Miracle Monocle, and Phantom Drift, among others. He lives in Santa Cruz and teaches at West Valley College.

Praise for Gembox

Lift the lid on Nils Michals’ Gembox and discover inside vast, sometimes terrifying, worlds. Here are half-finished skyscrapers, waves “loaded with the silhouettes of sharks,” a petrified forest, and “matterhorns of sky blue frosting.” Here is the buzzing of human activity, as if seen from high above. And here are more magical boxes, some made of ticky-tacky, others lavishly, lovingly carved, each a portal to new understanding. Michals writes with grace, wit, and the kind of eye that discovers in the everyday the marvels of a world we half recognize set against the echoes of our own mortality.
—Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them and Churches

Glitter and light abound in Gembox, but also so much more. The boxes of Michals’ prose poems include boomboxes, toy packaging, “the manufactured sun of the happylight therapy box,” “chatterboxes, sauceboxes,” houses, rooms, treasure chests, “a box which represents a choice,” “a box to stand for all that desire to be inside.” The poems here are allusively full, imaginative, and precise. Readers will be charmed by the author’s shimmering wordplay, and the recurring “x” in every box guides us through this poetic journey; we follow the characters—the man, the woman, the child, the fjordhorse, you, and I—through dreamlike landscapes and cityscapes, locations both universal and particular. As we recognize these boxes, we also happily lose, and find, ourselves within them.
—Genevieve Kaplan, author of In the ice house and travelogue

Gembox is a brilliant new encounter with an old way of speaking, an emblematic workaround for “literal inabilities to communicate.” Located somewhere between trash and nostalgia are the “dice box, night cap, lottery ticket, horse pistol, someone’s very dark humor”—the ephemera and knickknacks of Michals’ rediscovered boxes that recount these wondrous and surprising poem-dreams.
—Richard Greenfield, author of Subterranean and Tracer