Deep Territory

Praise for Deep Territory

There is a special sense of kinship and community in Michael Malan's poems: trees, streams, clouds, horses, and horizons. All things are alert, articulate, and time in touch with the timeless. These are poems of thanksgiving, and calm recognition.

                                                         -Robert Morgan, author of Dark Energy

These are visionary poems, and the world they envision is a shapeshifting realm where trees speak and rivers dream, where stones sing and the moon is "a broken compass in the heart of memory." In this territory, the dull rules of ordinary reality no longer apply. Here you might "open a window in a waterfall /and find a mirror in a forest." Anything might turn into anything else. Filled with wild images and stunning metaphors, these poems have the power to restore us to the imaginative freedom of childhood. Deep Territory is a profoundly refreshing book.

                                      -John Brehm, author of No Day at the Beach and The Dharma of Poetry

Of all the gifts poetry can provide, perhaps the greatest is the work of the spirit, and Michael Malan's Deep Territory is profoundly engaged in the spiritual work of the written word. These poems grapple with the great question of what it means to be a human being alive in the world, providing us with a space of solace and light, "a tent for the living" in the midst of a chaotic century. I find myself returning to these poems again and again, captivated by their imagery and enriched by the sense of wonder they inspire. 

                         -Holly Karapetkova, Arlington County Poet Laureate, author of Towline

Michael Malan is the author of Overland Park (Blue Light Press, 2017), a collection of poetry and flash fiction and Tarzan's Jungle Plane (Blue Light Press, 2019), a collection of prose poems. His work has appeared in Epoch, Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry East, and other journals. He is the editor of Cloudbank, a literary journal published in Corvallis, Oregon.