Capacity, the extraordinary new collection from the award-winning poet James McMichael, deliberates an earth that supplies what people need to live. Land, water, sky, food, shelter, thought, talk, sex--each is addressed at the pace of someone dense with wonder's resistance to take for granted even the smallest or most obvious parts of existence.

Capacity is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

A poignant new collection with visionary clarity from a National Book Award finalist

If You Can Tell, the new book of poems by James McMichael, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006, takes up what it might mean that the word was in the beginning, before which there may not have been "empty / space, / even, / nor the thought of it." A baby is conceived after a verbal exchange between his parents. He's born and learns to talk. Told that the grandfather he cherishes has died, he unknowingly silences any memory of the man. To his Sunday school class a few...

For James McMichael, Joyce's Ulysses invites the wide range of interpretations it has received: what it also does is to prod its interpreters to put the book to some just use. If Ulysses were more conventional than it is, McMichael claims, its readers could set more comfortable limits for themselves in their responses to it, limits that did not extend beyond Ulysses into their dealings with persons in the world. But what happens instead is that the singularly unconventional narrative structure of Ulysses keeps reminding them that the story they are being told about any of the...