Angol
Collected Poems 2005-2025 brings together two decades of Michele McDannold's poetry, a body of work as restless and unyielding as the years it spans. From the back roads of rural Illinois to the wreckage and resilience of American life, McDannold writes with a hard-earned clarity-equal parts bruised and luminous. These poems carry the weight of survival, the raw nerve of intimacy, the dark humor of someone who has seen too much and kept going anyway.
Gathered here are poems from across McDannold's published collections and chapbooks, alongside new and uncollected work, charting the evolution of a voice that has become both uncompromising and unmistakable. Collected Poems 2005-2025 is not a retreat into nostalgia but a reckoning-an honest, fiercely human record of twenty years in language.
MICHELE MCDANNOLD has organized poetry events and/or performed poetry with a bunch of unabashed free-thinkers across this great United States, most happily by roadtrip but sometimes by plane, train or coincidence. She spends most of her time producing and publishing books, when she's not out killing miles with her magical jeep. Michele is the founder of The Literary Underground, Roadside Press, and Citizens for Decent Literature Press.
"There comes a time in life when a writer begins to reflect on the work she's done in this world. Enter Michele McDannold and her Collected Poems 2005-2025. This is a massive collection of poetry worth owning because no one tells you exactly how it is like McDannold. The poems are relatable, soul-crushing, painfully honest, and more on the side of maudlin than many dare to go. The work is both in your face and quiet. This collection is an inside look at what it means to be human in these dark times, what it feels like to be perpetually in motion both mentally and physically, and still, somehow, want to get up every day and do it again. There is love in here-sometimes sweet, but mostly jaded. It is a collection to keep by the bedside to remind yourself that it is okay to use your voice, to speak when others tell you to be quiet, and to understand that life is hard for all of us. "Do not become the poem/she will treat you/ as an open wound/in a salt factory," this is what Michele McDannold speaks to, what she has spent her life doing not only for herself, but for others. She gives a voice to her own struggles and pain and paves the way for the rest of us."-Aleathia Drehmer, author of Little Graveyards (Roadside Press)
