More Money than God

by Richard Michelson

How do we come to terms with loss? How do we find love after tragedy?  How can art and language help us to cope with life, and honor the dead? How does one act responsibly in a world that is both beautiful, full of suffering, and balanced precariously on the edge of despair and ruin? With humor, anger and great tenderness, Richard Michelson’s poems explore the boundaries between the personal and the political, and the connections between history and memory.  Growing up under the shadow of the Holocaust, in a Brooklyn neighborhood consumed with racial strife, Michelson’s experiences were far from ordinary, yet they remain too much a part of the greater circle of poverty and violence to be dismissed as merely private concerns, safely past. It is Michelson’s sense of humor and acute awareness of Jewish history, with its ancient emphasis on the fundamental worth of human existence that makes this accessible book, finally, celebratory and life-affirming.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 13, 2015

Reviews

[Aimee]

I've said it before about this author and I'll say it again, it is so rare to encounter such literary writing in contemporary poetry. Literary and written with the skill of a longtime poet, but also raw and real. Even though Michelson's poetry is very personal (like most poetry) and often includes themes of his father's murder, being a father himself, growing up Jewish in an African-American neighborhood in NYC, you can't read his poems and not find something of yourself in them for simply being human in a world that is equally terrifying and exhilarating.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the November/December 2015 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Miriam Jacobs]

This collection makes me wish I had the writer's life so I could have written these poems!