How We Enter the Palace - by Michelle Blake (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

HOW WE ENTER THE PALACE is a book born of faith and patience. The book has a strong sense of the divine, the larger world where all people, places, events, and knowledge exist, both simultaneously and chronologically. One way the poet accesses that faith is through persona poems in the voices of Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Helen Keller, and other characters who have shown up along the way. The persona poem breaks the barriers of what the poet CAN know and allows her entrance into what others have known. Inevitably, the voices and visions of these mystics slip into all the poems in the book, so the most mundane moment (remembering something stupid from years earlier) becomes a moment of grace.

Review Quotes

"Signs and sacraments abound--'lights switched on at dusk like wishes for night to rise, ' 'the grey dust of day on sills and quilts'--in Michelle Blake's acute and beautifully made poems...Blake has heard Roethke's invocation to "live in perpetual great astonishment," for her compassionate, luminous poems transport us through glib and difficult times 'into the wide and startling world.'"--Catherine MacDonald, winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize for Rousing the Machiner

"From its opening section, in which she claims kinship with biblical and historical women, to its final, visionary sequence, Michelle Blake's How We Enter the Palace is the work of a mature artist, woman, seeker, and thinker. Many of these poems, carnal and spiritual, human and necessary, originate in mourning and aspire to a sublime acceptance. In prayers, narratives, lyrics, elegies, again and again, precise observation blossoms into insight. These poems honor the difficulty of living and, as Blake writes in the title poem, allow 'the world to crack the cage of our ribs/ so we enter the palace heart first.' This is a book of power and grace, gravitas and wonder."--Richard Hoffman, author of People Once Real

"In her new collection, Michelle Blake leads readers on a pilgrimage into the past, into an exploration of the divine and, equally holy, human feminine. Ancestral, familiar imagery is made new, offered to us rinsed and gleaming, alive within incantations. There's a breathlessness here, as well as a bravery in looking back this way at sacred stories, family history and our heroes. Blake's lines slice all the way through, one of the best things that poetry can do."--Megan Buchanan, author of Clothesline Religion

About the Author

Michelle Blake wrote a trilogy of mysteries, with Lily Connor, and her chapbook, INTO THE WIDE AND STARTLING WORLD, was selected for the New Women's Voices Series at Finishing Line Press. In 2014, she published a collaboration with visual artist Fran Forman, in which she wrote a series of poems and a fable. She has published poems and essays in MORE Magazine, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Banyan Press Anthology, Cedar Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, Solstice Lit Journal, Cider Press Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Asheville Poetry Review and many other magazines and anthologies.