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When The Wolves Come After You Hang On
When the Wolves Come After You Hang On is about suffering and living with chronic pain and other multiple health issues. It's about living with neurological, immunological problems and debilitating fatigue, to the point of being isolated and housebound at its worst. It's also about the journey we all take, sometimes alone, to find hope through the hopelessness, and enduring trials in grace
A digital version of this book for iPad can be purchased for $2.99 at the below link.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id12...
Ebooks for Nook for 2.99 can be found at Barnes and Noble:
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To read a page turning edition on your laptop or computer for 5.99:
https://www.magzter.com/US/GOSS183-Pu...
A digital version of this book for iPad can be purchased for $2.99 at the below link.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id12...
Ebooks for Nook for 2.99 can be found at Barnes and Noble:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-...
To read a page turning edition on your laptop or computer for 5.99:
https://www.magzter.com/US/GOSS183-Pu...
- GenresPoetry
32 pages, Paperback
Published February 7, 2017
5 people want to read
About the author
Michael Parker
1 bookMichael Parker was born and raised in Utah. Most all of his youth he spent in the heart of Castle Valley gaining an education and love of film while working at his parent's theaters. He graduated with a degree in English from Brigham Young University, during which he also pursued courses in Greek civilization, myth & folklore and language which still come across in his writings to this day. After graduation, Michael followed a career into technical writing, which grew into writing and graphical design work for marketing and product management teams. He began writing poetry more seriously in 2006 and has published an online chapbook as well as other poems and book reviews for online literary magazines and numerous print literary & art journals. He is co-author on his most recent book, When The Wolves Come After You Hang On, with Pris Campbell. Before being sidelined with serious back issues, Michael was an avid runner, having completed ten marathons and too numerous other half marathons, 10ks, etc. to count. His favorite race was the Hood to Coast relay race in Oregon, which he has participated twice. He, his wife, and three kids live in Orem, Utah with their dog Lucky and two cats, Books and Needles.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 19, 2017
A Review of "When the Wolves Come After You Hang On," by Edward Nudelman
This collaborative poetry collection, by Michael Parker and Pris Campbell, grabs you at the cover with an evocative image and further twists your mind with an even bolder title, “When the Wolves Come After You Hang On.” Here you will find nine poems by Parker, eight by Campbell, and two additional co-written poems. The book opens with the collaborative effort, “The Hermit,” which forms a sort of test case for how well the format is going to fly. I’ve read collaborative poems before, and have often been let down by a lack of cohesiveness, if not a complete breakdown of voice. Nothing like that happens here. We find in the opening couplet a model or motif for much of what follows in the book, “How the wolves at the door cause you to withdraw/How the mourning dove-song plays for your hours.” The illusory ‘wolves’ take many forms and shapes in the book, but in all cases, they represent a kind of distress that repels assuagement, chronic, all consuming, and immutably painful. The poem opens up into a psalm of expression and emotive purging. We are introduced to the strife of the speaker in a measured way, stone by stone, until the full edifice of the house of suffering is fully appreciated. We know the pain is great, but what kind, what form does it take? Is there hope? There are wolves, and there are wars, those that “mock your attempt to fight…” “And when the wolves come after you hang on/Nothing matters other than this.” It’s an excellent poem, even more so, considering it was co-written, and well placed in the ordering.
Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to experience chronic pain, unabated pain, crippling pain, knows the fragmentary life that can result, affecting every aspect of personhood, daily living and pursuits, coping, and of course depression and anxiety. But this is a book that asks the reader to come alongside the sufferer, a kind of co-mingling, entering in to aspects that might not have been apparent or a part of their experience. I personally know each of the authors, so I know the authenticity of the individuals; and hence, the authenticity of the poetry ensues, by default.
For Parker, there is a sense of magnification and broadening: Who knows our travail? Who can explain our situation? Who even notices? In “Knight of Wands,” he asks “What explains our struggles’ centrality? We have lost the guide star. The nights are all black and shadows, and we are bleak with a quotidian affinity for our very own insufferable violent solitude.” Both authors express the depths of their calamity, but Parker prefers illusory reference in order to compare, if not accentuate, pathos. “Blood has come out on the leaves on the trees,” he writes, grappling out loud with issues of origin and purpose.
One of my favorites by Campbell, “Undertow,” deals with another kind of pain, as physical as disease, and perhaps as crippling: the loss of her father and then, surprisingly, her mother. But it was only in retrospect and years later, in light of her own physical disease and travail, that the poem could have taken shape with the same magnitude of identification. “I expected my father’s death to draw the sea to my feet, the water threatening to bear me away with it—not mother’s.” A wonderful opening quatrain, and the poem moves into an argument of remembrance in contradistinction to the healing power of perspective, comparing her past difficulties with her mother to her present strife in disease. Speaking of her mother, Campbell beautifully writes, “After my knees buckled… the core of metal between us softened…” The poem ends returning to a familiar theme of the book, namely, the difficulty to cope with loss in any circumstance, much less those compromised with chronic pain or disease.
There are many compelling poems in this book, some that open up into panoramic and illusory forays of imagination: mermaids singing songs of healing, a man with horns dancing with a red-lipped woman, soft-shelled ghosts, jukeboxes longing to be plugged in, fractals replicating and stretching to unseen spheres. You will want to read this book, if only for the colorful imagery, the expansive metaphors running throughout and relating well to sickness, fear, hope and shattered hope. But I hope you will also relish the lines between the lines, the opportunity to make yourself a more compassionate person by entering into the suffering of another, and by so doing, broadening your scope and amplitude for healing others.
I haven’t spoken with either Pris or Michael personally about the poems themselves, but I can suggest, almost without reservation, that the purpose in writing them was not so much cathartic healing, though I’m sure much catharsis was afforded… but more importantly, I think the authors show a desire to inform and illustrate what chronic pain and disease can do to a person. Poetry is one of the cleanest mediums to accomplish this. You don’t need to provide answers or explanations. You aren’t writing a self-help book. You are opening up your life and sharing it visually as well as poetically. I love the book, I love the poems, and I love the concept of writing it as a collaboration, though I’d never, ever take it on, because it’s too difficult. Michael and Pris have fared well in this regard. Please buy a copy for yourself and your friend. And your friend’s friend. –Edward Nudelman, poet, scientist. Three poetry books, the latest, “Out of Time, Running,” Harbor Mountain Press, 2012.
This collaborative poetry collection, by Michael Parker and Pris Campbell, grabs you at the cover with an evocative image and further twists your mind with an even bolder title, “When the Wolves Come After You Hang On.” Here you will find nine poems by Parker, eight by Campbell, and two additional co-written poems. The book opens with the collaborative effort, “The Hermit,” which forms a sort of test case for how well the format is going to fly. I’ve read collaborative poems before, and have often been let down by a lack of cohesiveness, if not a complete breakdown of voice. Nothing like that happens here. We find in the opening couplet a model or motif for much of what follows in the book, “How the wolves at the door cause you to withdraw/How the mourning dove-song plays for your hours.” The illusory ‘wolves’ take many forms and shapes in the book, but in all cases, they represent a kind of distress that repels assuagement, chronic, all consuming, and immutably painful. The poem opens up into a psalm of expression and emotive purging. We are introduced to the strife of the speaker in a measured way, stone by stone, until the full edifice of the house of suffering is fully appreciated. We know the pain is great, but what kind, what form does it take? Is there hope? There are wolves, and there are wars, those that “mock your attempt to fight…” “And when the wolves come after you hang on/Nothing matters other than this.” It’s an excellent poem, even more so, considering it was co-written, and well placed in the ordering.
Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to experience chronic pain, unabated pain, crippling pain, knows the fragmentary life that can result, affecting every aspect of personhood, daily living and pursuits, coping, and of course depression and anxiety. But this is a book that asks the reader to come alongside the sufferer, a kind of co-mingling, entering in to aspects that might not have been apparent or a part of their experience. I personally know each of the authors, so I know the authenticity of the individuals; and hence, the authenticity of the poetry ensues, by default.
For Parker, there is a sense of magnification and broadening: Who knows our travail? Who can explain our situation? Who even notices? In “Knight of Wands,” he asks “What explains our struggles’ centrality? We have lost the guide star. The nights are all black and shadows, and we are bleak with a quotidian affinity for our very own insufferable violent solitude.” Both authors express the depths of their calamity, but Parker prefers illusory reference in order to compare, if not accentuate, pathos. “Blood has come out on the leaves on the trees,” he writes, grappling out loud with issues of origin and purpose.
One of my favorites by Campbell, “Undertow,” deals with another kind of pain, as physical as disease, and perhaps as crippling: the loss of her father and then, surprisingly, her mother. But it was only in retrospect and years later, in light of her own physical disease and travail, that the poem could have taken shape with the same magnitude of identification. “I expected my father’s death to draw the sea to my feet, the water threatening to bear me away with it—not mother’s.” A wonderful opening quatrain, and the poem moves into an argument of remembrance in contradistinction to the healing power of perspective, comparing her past difficulties with her mother to her present strife in disease. Speaking of her mother, Campbell beautifully writes, “After my knees buckled… the core of metal between us softened…” The poem ends returning to a familiar theme of the book, namely, the difficulty to cope with loss in any circumstance, much less those compromised with chronic pain or disease.
There are many compelling poems in this book, some that open up into panoramic and illusory forays of imagination: mermaids singing songs of healing, a man with horns dancing with a red-lipped woman, soft-shelled ghosts, jukeboxes longing to be plugged in, fractals replicating and stretching to unseen spheres. You will want to read this book, if only for the colorful imagery, the expansive metaphors running throughout and relating well to sickness, fear, hope and shattered hope. But I hope you will also relish the lines between the lines, the opportunity to make yourself a more compassionate person by entering into the suffering of another, and by so doing, broadening your scope and amplitude for healing others.
I haven’t spoken with either Pris or Michael personally about the poems themselves, but I can suggest, almost without reservation, that the purpose in writing them was not so much cathartic healing, though I’m sure much catharsis was afforded… but more importantly, I think the authors show a desire to inform and illustrate what chronic pain and disease can do to a person. Poetry is one of the cleanest mediums to accomplish this. You don’t need to provide answers or explanations. You aren’t writing a self-help book. You are opening up your life and sharing it visually as well as poetically. I love the book, I love the poems, and I love the concept of writing it as a collaboration, though I’d never, ever take it on, because it’s too difficult. Michael and Pris have fared well in this regard. Please buy a copy for yourself and your friend. And your friend’s friend. –Edward Nudelman, poet, scientist. Three poetry books, the latest, “Out of Time, Running,” Harbor Mountain Press, 2012.
February 20, 2017
A poetic melding of metaphysics, spirituality, release, and resonance lay reflective under the cosmos. These two voices, as similar as distinct, give heart to existence, in living and dying, writing out their chronic illnesses in evocative poems that allow entry to their constant battle. As expressive as Frida Kahlo in her paintings, these poems ache in their exposure. An Animism flows in consonants, as in THE HERMIT – “You will look to the moon to be taught.” (And I, for one, do.)
My soul felt such comfort in these poems, even when they dealt with dying, as if seeing that white light with its gentle welcome, so infinite, so fluid. In RUMINATIONS OF A MAN IN A FAILING BODY UNDER A PERFECT SKY, one accepts, yet holds…
A thousand black Winter birds explode from the leafless poplars.
And I am still searching for a safe place for a home for my hope.
The sad waning of lust and health beyond its love is lamented in DISCARDED CLIMAXES -
You once liked the heat of my body
dancing you to your own climax
The strength of the bard is written like runes in a forest of wisdom. It is not a warning, but a statement of what simply is. How a poet makes, breaks or exults in combinations read or sung. From LIVING NEW WORDS -
Vociferous, because of the power behind every word spoken is a storm;
I can tear down houses, or upon each phrase, grow a garden.
But what can one do when faced with the knowing? The limited, the terminal? What of our essence? The remainder? How do we secure that aspect to life? From COUNT DOWN -
I wonder how much time
I have left to write, hug those I love,
offer apologies.
In near dream state, where the wolves are merely a hindrance, these poems glow gossamer bioluminescence across seas of surrender. Glittering flecks of maybe with punctuated perseverance. There is strength in numbers, they say. Of these two, we have an army.
How / Where to order
Print
http://www.blurb.com/b/7740734-when-t...
iPad ebook
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id12...
My soul felt such comfort in these poems, even when they dealt with dying, as if seeing that white light with its gentle welcome, so infinite, so fluid. In RUMINATIONS OF A MAN IN A FAILING BODY UNDER A PERFECT SKY, one accepts, yet holds…
A thousand black Winter birds explode from the leafless poplars.
And I am still searching for a safe place for a home for my hope.
The sad waning of lust and health beyond its love is lamented in DISCARDED CLIMAXES -
You once liked the heat of my body
dancing you to your own climax
The strength of the bard is written like runes in a forest of wisdom. It is not a warning, but a statement of what simply is. How a poet makes, breaks or exults in combinations read or sung. From LIVING NEW WORDS -
Vociferous, because of the power behind every word spoken is a storm;
I can tear down houses, or upon each phrase, grow a garden.
But what can one do when faced with the knowing? The limited, the terminal? What of our essence? The remainder? How do we secure that aspect to life? From COUNT DOWN -
I wonder how much time
I have left to write, hug those I love,
offer apologies.
In near dream state, where the wolves are merely a hindrance, these poems glow gossamer bioluminescence across seas of surrender. Glittering flecks of maybe with punctuated perseverance. There is strength in numbers, they say. Of these two, we have an army.
How / Where to order
http://www.blurb.com/b/7740734-when-t...
iPad ebook
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id12...
February 20, 2017
A poetic melding of metaphysics, spirituality, release, and resonance lay reflective under the cosmos. These two voices, as similar as distinct, give heart to existence, in living and dying, writing out their chronic illnesses in evocative poems that allow entry to their constant battle. As expressive as Frida Kahlo in her paintings, these poems ache in their exposure. An Animism flows in consonants, as in THE HERMIT – “You will look to the moon to be taught.” (And I, for one, do.)
My soul felt such comfort in these poems, even when they dealt with dying, as if seeing that white light with its gentle welcome, so infinite, so fluid. In RUMINATIONS OF A MAN IN A FAILING BODY UNDER A PERFECT SKY, one accepts, yet holds…
A thousand black Winter birds explode from the leafless poplars.
And I am still searching for a safe place for a home for my hope.
The sad waning of lust and health beyond its love is lamented in DISCARDED CLIMAXES -
You once liked the heat of my body
dancing you to your own climax
The strength of the bard is written like runes in a forest of wisdom. It is not a warning, but a statement of what simply is. How a poet makes, breaks or exults in combinations read or sung. From LIVING NEW WORDS -
Vociferous, because of the power behind every word spoken is a storm;
I can tear down houses, or upon each phrase, grow a garden.
But what can one do when faced with the knowing? The limited, the terminal? What of our essence? The remainder? How do we secure that aspect to life? From COUNT DOWN -
I wonder how much time
I have left to write, hug those I love,
offer apologies.
In near dream state, where the wolves are merely a hindrance, these poems glow gossamer bioluminescence across seas of surrender. Glittering flecks of maybe with punctuated perseverance. There is strength in numbers, they say. Of these two, we have an army.
How / Where to order
Print
http://www.blurb.com/b/7740734-when-t...
iPad ebook
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id12...
My soul felt such comfort in these poems, even when they dealt with dying, as if seeing that white light with its gentle welcome, so infinite, so fluid. In RUMINATIONS OF A MAN IN A FAILING BODY UNDER A PERFECT SKY, one accepts, yet holds…
A thousand black Winter birds explode from the leafless poplars.
And I am still searching for a safe place for a home for my hope.
The sad waning of lust and health beyond its love is lamented in DISCARDED CLIMAXES -
You once liked the heat of my body
dancing you to your own climax
The strength of the bard is written like runes in a forest of wisdom. It is not a warning, but a statement of what simply is. How a poet makes, breaks or exults in combinations read or sung. From LIVING NEW WORDS -
Vociferous, because of the power behind every word spoken is a storm;
I can tear down houses, or upon each phrase, grow a garden.
But what can one do when faced with the knowing? The limited, the terminal? What of our essence? The remainder? How do we secure that aspect to life? From COUNT DOWN -
I wonder how much time
I have left to write, hug those I love,
offer apologies.
In near dream state, where the wolves are merely a hindrance, these poems glow gossamer bioluminescence across seas of surrender. Glittering flecks of maybe with punctuated perseverance. There is strength in numbers, they say. Of these two, we have an army.
How / Where to order
http://www.blurb.com/b/7740734-when-t...
iPad ebook
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id12...
Read
July 25, 2022I was a co-author so it isn’t appropriate for me to comment but Michael Parker is a gifted writer.
February 21, 2017
These two poets (a man and a woman) are remarkable in their expression of how it feels to live with a chronic illness! I downloaded the book but will now order a hard copy!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews