Morning Constitutional // Michael Magee	"Place -- under arrest, outside the Ben Franklin House, a bit of declarative rhetoric echoing past the old psych ward, a decaying neighborhood, jazz struggling, the Amerinesiac that must needs awaken and feel its limbs. "The untimely state's AM radio" getting played here, detuned and refracted through Magee's acute sense of history and hearing. Here that? Michael Magee's poetry, "buzzes with the legislative, polemical and liberatory static of American political history" (K. Silem Mohammed). This buzzing refracts to us from the highway to the needle exchange, the monument to the bus stop. Magee is one of the most well-informed American poet-listeners. Bob Perelman says "his poems sound out the present tense histories and provide democratic key signatures so different people can play their meanings at once. We hear about a better place -- all the time, if we listen. But getting there is not an automatic thing. These poems help." Or as Heather Fuller writes, "This is not your ordinary peripateticism. For what Michael has tapped into is the psychotic tyranny of the antecedent, in which everything is thing, everyone is they, and all else is it, and this is how it is." "a high fidelity version of me staple-gunned" From Al Filreis's review, Writers House Listserv, May 12, 1999: I just read around in Morning Constitutional and can hardly wait to read the rest. "Florida," with its fractured refrains of Declaration of Independence idiom ("endowed by its electrocutor w/ certain ukeleleable frights"--the modifier reminding me of Arthur Godfrey of Floridian fame), is just stunningly, disgustingly, right. The title poem tours constitutional and brotherly-love ironies, very "political." And of course there's "Pledge," which uses the variations mode to alter or re-compose the Pledge of Allegiance--marvelous. Many of us have heard "Pledge" read at the Writers House, including me; but what amazed me as I read the poem in the new book is how far you've pushed it, how amazingly many variations you've made of it. The last one begins, "I planned a neat myth...." Congrats on the publication (and to Kristen, and presumably others, for making it). from A DETROIT OF THE MIND, pg 11: I thought all night along I 90 until my back of my mind was killing me think yourself to Detroit never having seen it, or a map Michigan is a glove, a mitten if you want the history of Detroit go find out for yourself they all said. The history of a stitch in a mitten? It got knit, now on my hand on the wheel $5 jobs and a not-so-great-migration a Ford to get lost the Right to Assembly To download this eBook, visit the E-Library. Required: free adobe acrobat reader.