Woods and Clouds Interchangeable

By Michael Earl Craig Description Reviews With his fifth collection of poems, Michael Earl Craig delivers a fresh set of tableaux that have us squinting aslant at the ordinary. Dexterously constructed, the scenes, conversations, letters, instructions, stories, bios, and little fables of Woods and Clouds Interchangeable twist the comedic into shapes of startling seriousness, making us laugh at the same time they widen the dimensions of the world we live in. In his craft book, The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young writes that “the highest achievement of human consciousness is imagination, and the highest achievement of imagination is empathy.” It seems every poem in Woods and Clouds Interchangeable evokes Young’s aphorism in the way that Craig’s characters either connect or fail to connect with one another through shared or refused imagination. Sometimes this theme takes the form of a plea for empathy between imaginative beings."Nate Duke, The Adroit Journal Woods and Clouds Inte