The Dead Eat Everything

Wick First Book

by Michael Mlekoday

"This book is a document of a particular world, real, wrenched from the poet's life, as if written with a gun to his head or a spike through his heart. Reading it is like opening a damp newspaper wrapped around a big fish just caught, fins glistening, scales shining, one rhymed eye open and looking right at you, daring you to eat the whole thing."

—Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men


SELF-PORTRAIT WITH GUNSHOT VERNACULAR

All summer was one wet weapon
after another: barb of sweetgum
in the ankle, stranger's knife blade,
the wasp stuck in your sneaker.
Rainfall kept the crack addicts
asleep in the church basement
amid remnants of the broken window.
O window, come again in glory
and the block will put a piece
of itself through you,
makeshift spear to the side,
stone to the back of the skull,
thunder of gunshot. Here,
we all know that sound.
If somebody flinch at firecrackers,
they may as well mispronounce
your name. This place is old
as a mother tongue.
Here, the world is always saying
Ya mama, Ya mama,
and you write poems
like they brass knuckles
or empty 4o bottles of O.E.
Believe that. Believe in wildlife,
that snarl and sex, glimmer
of I, I, until death.
Most people stop believing
in lions after visiting the zoo,
but you seen too many broken locks
and this neighborhood is bordered
by a jawbone made of light.
Rhyme or die. Shoot or die.
Smuggle yourself out
like a banned book or die.
This is the voice
calling to you in the wilderness,
its dark milk like blood in the throat.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Michael Mlekoday is the author of The Dead Eat Everything (Kent State University Press, 2014), selected by Dorianne Laux as the winner of the 2012 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. In 2009, Mlekoday won the National Poetry Slam as a member of the St. Paul team, and returned the following year to coach the team to its second championship. Mlekoday's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, The Cincinnati Review, Verse Daily, and other venues.

Reviews

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mlekoday's lyrical pace is a standout, and several lines I stopped and read three or four times to fully get the image in my head. A little too much repetition for me, however. I will also acknowledge that I cannot fully appreciate the experiences that he is referring to because my level of privilege allowed me a better living environment. I do appreciate though that his poetry allows people like me to genuinely contemplate what his life was like in contrast to my own.

[Taka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made Me Excited to Write Poetry Again--

Just listen to this: "Play your favorite songs / for everyone who will listen, / and the way the old records bend like dementia—that." And Mlekoday's poetry is that, dementia—slick, vinyl-covered nightmare of city life remixed in Hip Hop cadence & with John-Donne-esque spirituality. For those of you who think contemporary poetry is confusing as hell or just indignantly obscure, this is a book you should read and let hymn through you (as Mlekoday might say). Accessible and powerful, it resurrects the Minneapolis of his childhood & loss, and graffities it with ferocity, with gunshot freshness, with spirituality that is at once intensely personal & fitting, counterpointing the brutality of urban life like a soft axe that bitch-slaps you out of nightmare: "I have skinned / the animal I found in me / & watched him wrench himself / back into the flesh. / I have made gods / of my skinned hands."

Read it. Find the animal in you, see it transformed into gods.

Highly Recommended.

[Annabelle Lowdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stumbled across this looking for essay readings. It’s visceral and rough and possibly my favourite poetry book I’ve ever read. I already want to read it again.

[Meghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

That scope of these poems manages to be at once broad--an examination of a city--and also heartbreakingly specific--a singular life. Mlekoday blew me away with the entire collection. this is not just a collection with a few standouts, but one that works as a whole, like a beautiful album. Specially recommended: "Don't ask why I stopped believing in magic," "the motherland," "playing dead means different things to different people."

[Zachary Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://k-statecreativewriting.tumblr....

[Sarah Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book killed me. Pun intended.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

a powerhouse of a book.