Green Migraine

by Michael Dickman

"Reading Michael [Dickman] is like stepping out of an overheated apartment building to be met, unexpectedly, by an exhilaratingly chill gust of wind."— The New Yorker "These are lithe, seemingly effortless poems, poems whose strange affective power remains even after several readings."— The Believer "My master plan is happiness," writes Michael Dickman in his wonderfully strange third book, Green Migraine . Here, imagination and reality swirl in the juxtaposition between beauty and violence in the natural world. Drawing inspiration from the verdant poetry of John Clare, Dickman uses hyper-real, dreamlike images to encapsulate, illustrate, and illuminate how we access internal and external landscapes. The result is nothing short of a fantastic, modern-day fairy tale. From "Where We Live": I used to live
in a mother now I live
in a sunflower Blinded by the silverware Blinded by the refrigerator I sit on a sidewalk
in the sunflower and its yellow
downpour… Michael Dickman is the winner of the 2010 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets for his second collection, Flies . His poems are regularly published in the New Yorker . He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and teaches poetry at Princeton University.

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2015

Reviews

[Dane Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection has quickly cemented Michael Dickman as one of my favourite poets. His poetry is chaos streamlined through an imagination put to a rhythm. It's jazzy and playful, sexy and often vulgar. It regards things with a curiosity that is neither critical nor reverent. It is wild and sparky, but unlike a lot of contemporary poetry, manages to remain accessible via the thematic thread that Dickman strings through each of his pieces, which the word-beat leads us along. I will definitely be reading more of him in the future.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few poems in I expected to hate the book but then something started clicking. The strange became spot-on. Metaphors that make little logical sense make all the sense in this eccentric world of color and animal.

[Atlas Wolfgang · Rating 5 out of 5]

My rating with partial stars would be 4.75.

I'm rereading this book with a friend for the spring equinox after first reading it in the winter. First I'll go over individual poems, then how I feel about the collection as a whole.

Bee Sting
This one's so sweet. I love the lazy afternoon feel and the way it feels like a hug to the reader, bees, and just the entire earth as a whole. My favorite stanza:

I've always wanted
to bump the stamen and start
the universe swaying

Dog Vertigo
The way Dickman uses repetition in this one is so visceral. It feels like an illustration of the way that grief works to rearrange different components of the same sentences, and for one line to flash clear as day, over and over, like a memory. I like the use of "were not", "did not", etc to show denial. My favorite bit:

One day I had a dog

I had three dogs

White Migraine
Dickman's way of elucidating his chronic pain makes it difficult not to feel pain while reading it. I can taste the white migraine somehow despite never experiencing one, and I don't think there's another way to describe it. My favorite stanza:

It peels the skin back from the roof of your mouth in metal petals that taste like snow

Red Migraine
THESE FUCKING HURT IN SUCH A GOOD WAY. It's such an interesting technique to not only designate each migraine with a color, but to only use imagery of the color as well. This one feels the most familiar to me as a meningitis survivor. My favorite line:

It wants to get naked and it wants it to hurt

Butterflies
I feel like the short but sweet nature of this one befits the tone and the life of a butterfly. It lets the big, hard-hitting line take up the right amount of space. The aforementioned line is my favorite:

There is no way to guess which way they'll go just scraps of air and then nothing at all like AM radio

Deer Crossing
I'm realizing with this one how Dickman tends to blur the lines between two disparate states of reality. The deer are both dead and not dead; same with the dogs. My favorite line:

If I flick my tail will you flick your tail and everyone flicks their tail before the air resettles our ears

Yellow Migraine
The sensory fatigue of this one definitely comes through. The yellow migraine is something I feel like I can sympathize with as an auDHD haver, even if I haven't had this exact pain. It's illustrated really well in what's probably my favorite stanza:

Listening
to someone else breathe
listening to static cling

Although I also like:

Yellow fingers work the yellow spine

as a closer.

Frog Labor
This one is somehow cute and yucky at the same time in a way that's perfect for frogs as creatures. I like how Dickman can use goofy-ass words like "kicky" without it feeling like a cop-out. My favorite stanza:

We wait and wait to hear
our names

Mouse Hunt
This is another one that toys with a binary in that it can be about both the cat and the mouse. It's very sweet. My favorite line is:

Your dreams rolled up inside the paper towels

It feels like it encapsulates the short-lived and frail nature of these little lives.

From the Canal
This really does feel like a snapshot of a canal and I love it. There are so many lines I enjoyed from this, because they create such a full picture. I particularly liked:

Gnats rise as one
white feathered lung
and breathe

Green Migraine
This feels dreamier and softer than "Yellow Migraine", but it's still very much an analogous color. It's sickly for sure, but there's a lot of softer details. I think my favorite line is:

I painted those with a silver-tipped paintbrush and an unopened bottle of mint cream amitriptyline

I'm on that medication! I know her.

Butterflies
Another "Butterflies"! They're a good interstitial tissue for this collection. I do love:

Someone changes the channel inside a cocoon

I adore how much this book comes back to change.

Black Migraine
This is the most cryptic of the migraines to me. It feels like it contains some grief and sorrow as well as the migraine pain. My favorite line is:

Someone keeps ripping the stitches out and then sewing them up again are they using their teeth

I'm loving the way that Dickman uses these run-ons to foster a feeling of panic, or urgency, or breathlessness.

A Cloudless Sky
I almost want to say that this would be called "Blue Migraine" were it not about the aura before a migraine? It starts out soft and painless, but then there's sharper imagery and the thunderheads building across the bedroom. This is such a banger opening:

A cloudless sky and I'm back
an ice-cold sky-blue rag
for my eyes

I've only had ocular migraines to my knowledge, but an ice-cold rag for my eyes is in fact the only method I've found successful for stopping them.

Foxtrot
I might be biased, because this poem was adapted into a song that drove me to buy this book, but this is my favorite one of the batch. It's such amazing winter imagery: a verbal shrine to a decaying fox in a snowy field. I love all of the lines, but the closer really hits:

Inside your chest
falls one flake of snow

Outside your chest it gets darker earlier

Where We Live
I like the recurrence of "I used to live in a _ now I live in a _". It definitely befits the descriptor of "modern-day fairytale" in the back-of-the-book blurb. I enjoy:

It scribbles its name on every living thing then erases it so what's left is more of a whisper than a mother

This feels like a fictionalized vignette around fragments of real memories.

Butterflies
These "Butterflies" poems are nice and snappy. I like the ending line:

Take one by mouth every hour

It feels like "and then I woke up" but done poetically and cohesively.

John Clare
I'd love to know who John Clare is and how they received this poem, if they did. Feels like a childhood friend that Dickman never got to tell something important or spend enough time with. I like the extension of "Dog Vertigo" and what feels like the processing of its trauma. I also like how shy and earnest the last two lines feel:

Here

I wanted to show you

Lullaby
I don't want kids, and no birthing person has ever sold me on having them. But this is one of the few art pieces I've seen that's made me understand why people have kids at all. Damn, this guy really loves his kid. I knew all those birds that he name-dropped!! This earns the "birds" slot in my friend's spring reading bingo. My favorite stanza:

You are so new
you could be gone tomorrow
and no one would know what to do

As a collection, this is a perfect spring read. Physically, I enjoy the multicolored stripes of the front cover and the mirror sheen on the back. I love the little tie-ins to previous poems and the through lines of wistfulness and change. It holds space for both pain and reprieve, as well as other contradicting concepts. It's something you can read through in one sitting and chew on for much longer.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exploring the interior and exterior landscapes, through the experience of color as well as other senses, this book of poetry is rich and lively.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A favorite of mine from Dickman. The organization of the "color" poems grounds this highly-associative and lyrical work. At once terrifyingly strange and familiar, Dickman's leaps leave us teetering on the edge, heels hanging--he's unabashed and unafraid. A collection that begs to be read and reread, one I've returned to for its intense strangeness.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I used to live / in a cloud now I live / in a crow."

A vision quest. A fever dream. A whirlwind of fragments and expansions and collapses. While I preferred Dickman's collection 'Flies', this was an enjoyable read.

"Your two hands are here two legs your brain is here a small snowy owl or a stuffed blue whale made out of a pair of pants."

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

“I am so happy/ I would like to take some drugs,” Dickman writes in “From the Canal,” which is clearly evident in these poems. Instead of “strange new butterflies,” this collection offers empty chrysalises of metaphors and images that hang from barren branches like indeterminate “insects screaming in the trees” while “someone changes the channel inside a cocoon.”

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could very well grow into 5 stars. I like many of Dickman’s lines very much. Not all of the pieces felt cohesive enough for me, but there were several I really loved from beginning to end. I’d like more time to sit with the whole book. I will be very happy to revisit it when the time is right.

[Maja · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me...

But also... I don't think it's very good... It feels like all its joints are broken. I almost gave up at the "we are blood people" afterbirth poem, but the collection is so short anyway that it wouldn't have made a difference.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the right book for me right now, that's all.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have migraines without aura. Dickman's poems are a bit like what I expect migraines with aura to be like. It's difficult to put words to the experience and I was impressed at his ability to do it. This is one I'll read again and again

[Chai Mignosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was lucky enough to have Michael come to my poetry class at UVM and read his work. This collection is superb.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ll call this book “Flies Redux”— Dickman’s tone and voice—and non sequiturs—are intact, but they don’t deliver the way Flies does. The longish closer “Lullaby” is tender and sweet.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dogs. Frogs. Butterfly. Lullaby. Dead fox. Good book.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

My least favourite book from Michael Dickman, but that being said there's still some gems here.

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dizzying and colorful, I read this in a single, mesmerized sitting at Powells. We can always rely on Copper Canyon for daring, lively voices that continue to extend the fabric of what makes poetry the breath of fire that it is.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning, well edited and quiet.