Bags and Tools - by Michael Fleming (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

What is compelling about Bags and Tools is its reach for a "we." The "we" was open enough and varied enough to encompass a wide swath of people(s) but did not assume a sameness--indeed, it sought in part to elucidate the matter of difference through questioning--it is nuanced and insightful. Much of this author's work is the same, plain-spoken, but upon reading it presents its concerns. What is in the bag of the speaker who presents themself as a would-be vagabond, a wayward traveler? A curious mind, a passionate search for a larger framework (God, Love) through what the reader could think of as letters to beloveds as much as dedications where names are cited. This is a book to read again, then again. It is the speaker's trying that is so relatable. The skein is thin here, so author and speaker are close. Michael Fleming effectively uses the tools of craft to take us along on this narrow path that widens and promises to open into broad understanding.

Review Quotes

"This unusually rich variety of lived experiences . . . a pleasure to read. Composed almost entirely in rhyme and meter, the book is also an impressive feat of formalism -- especially since the gorgeous musicality in Fleming's poems never gets in the way of what the author is communicating. . . . [The} work feels less like a casting off of tools and more like a gathering of them. . . . Fleming's exceptionally well-wrought debut is a reminder of how rewarding the unseen labor of the mind can be." --Benjamin Aleshire, SevenDays

"Here is a steady poetic hand working within the beautiful boundaries of form, rhythm, and rhyme while engaging myriad points of view--a jaguar, the scores paid in Vichy France, an astronaut, to name just three. Michael Fleming's imagination knows no limits as he ponders and feels his way through one emotional landscape after another. The sheer level of articulation is quietly dazzling: the right word consistently appearing in the right place. I am reminded of something ancient yet ever contemporary and ever crucial: the honesty of the poet's labors." --Baron Wormser, author of Unidentified Sighing Objects

"Michael Fleming's debut collection brims with wit and irresistible music. His finely crafted poems are songs that carry the pulse of human experience, speak in the voices of animals, leap into the future and back through history. Bags and Tools has a global vision, moving from ballad to blues, Vermont woods to New York streets, bringing friends and lovers along for the ride with insistent rhythmic energy. What a gift these wise poems are! Fleming sings of a broken world still resonant with hope, where 'the sky's an ocean, breathing tides of light.'" --Diana Whitney, author of Wanting It

"The big-hearted poems in Michael Fleming's Bags and Tools welcome you into their world, their deep learning worn lightly. By turns they celebrate the good, using their forms to shape those thoughts, while other poems, such as the crown of sonnets that constitutes "Corona," use form to hold together the things around us that seem ready to explode. In this dark time, these poems are candles no wind can blow out." --Wyn Cooper, author of Mars Poetica

About the Author

Michael Fleming was born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, and has lived and learned and worked all around the world, from Thailand, England, and Swaziland to Berkeley, New York City, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. He's been a teacher, a grad student, a carpenter, a musician, and always a writer; for the past twenty years he has edited books of every description.