Michael’s Books

Nothing Remembers

Beginning in Pompeii, Nothing Remembers visits the US Midwest and Jerusalem, where Michael Dickel (the author) now lives. The musical contemporary and at times jazzy experimental poetry re-members loss, relationship, and human connections with the world, while at the same time questioning the fallibility of memory and failure of poetry in undertaking such an endeavor. The poems engage geography and geology in the world(s) they inhabit. Ghosts people these places as palimpsests, while the poetry ranges through Kabbalah, philosophy, physics, and psychology. These poems dive deeper than confession or angst and avoid autobiography. Instead, they engage the heart, body, mind, and soul of the reader in their rich and often surrealistic imagery. They observe the full range of reality while reaching for acceptance, but do not despair. In the end, the poems suggest hope for human relationships and communication. There is, here, a deep love of the world below the surface.

Order a copy of Nothing Remembers (2019)
From Finishing Line Press
Also available on Amazon

The Palm Reading after The Toad’s Garden

Michael Dickel’s highly engaging fourth book gathers flash fiction written in recent years—from a series of surreal memoryscapes to flash thrillers to psychological experiments. This hybrid writing blurs genre lines across poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and philosophy in an entertaining montage of imagery. The woman with a beard—the unnamed main character of the first series of stories—travels as much in her mind as in the world around her, but somehow all merges with her memories to reveal emotional realities of being human. She and the toad commune somehow, through magical surrealism and mystical physics.

$15.00

War Surrounds Us

Michael Dickel’s third book of poetry collects poems he wrote during the Israel-Hamas conflict of summer, 2014. The poems evoke a resistance to the violence all around, and make acute observations of its effects on family and daily life—from the provocations before, through the disruptions of rockets falling on Jerusalem and devastating loss of human life during attacks on Gaza, and past the line of failed cease fires to an uneasy truce. The closely observed incongruence of daily life while war rages comes through as the poet witnesses his young son’s responses and considers the question of the future we want versus the one that is coming.

$10.00