previous book title | next book title | return to book titles

Imago Mundi Michelle Mitchell-Foust 1-932418-12-1 $14.00 ©2005 order this title       Michelle Mitchell-Foust was born in Monticello, Illinois on March 29, 1963. She is the author of Circassian Girl, which was the winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize in 2001. Her poetry has been anthologized in Wild Flowers Every Year (James Publishing Company), Chapter and Verse (HWA), New Voices: University and College Poetry Prizes (Academy of American Piets), The Best Writers at Work Anthology (Pecan Grove Press), Missouri Arts Council Writers' Biennial Anthology (The Missouri Review). Ms. Mitchell-Foust's honors include a Discovery/The Nation Award, the Columbia University poetry prize, the Missouri Arts Council Writers' Biennial Award, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. She has received fellowships from the Writers at Work foundation as well as the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is a founder of the Casa Romantica Poetry Series, and an American Poet in Residence at the Poets' House in Donegal, Ireland. She lives in Southern California with her husband.	A relentlessly curious empiricist happily at large in the world's plenitude—a plenitude as mythical as it is sensuous—Michelle Mitchell-Foust is somehow also a connoisseur of the eerie and the spectral. Master of the odd, brilliantly lit detail, she excels as well at the labyrinthine, filigreed narrative in which contemporary and historical and fabulous figures intertwine. Hers is a singular and ambitious sensibility that at every unpredictable turn testifies to her devotion to the concrete word. —Stephen Yenser     There's no denying the love Michelle has for the sublime and grotesque. She's not afraid to blow out the candle and speak with spirits, to look at things most would turn away from. I have to believe in those dark places or other worlds that writers tend to live, Michelle developed a language, one that fascinates me. Imago Mundi introduced to me her rare language—one all her own—one that is full of heart. With Imago Mundi, she invited me to listen to her language—and if you listen you will leave inspired—like I did. —Mark Polish
from Imago Mundi
Model for Simberg's "Wounded Angel" The exiles are passing by with their brushes and cleaning solutions. They remind her that everything she does from now on is of her own volition, especially her listening at the door for a swish of hair, for something around the various echoes that are the mainstay of the cool darkness of the empty schoolroom. A name whistles inside her, a molecule, little flesh chime, the tiny distress call of a single, white Barbie shoe turned on its side in the drive. An airsickness band falls from her purse, gray, lint-covered. It takes its time falling. This is as true for angels as it is for women: