Blue Collar Eulogies is the second full-length book of poems by Michael Meyerhofer, the award-winning author of Leaving Iowa. Poet Dorianne Laux says, Michael Meyerhofer takes us with him everywhere he goes, from the back rooms of hash-slingers to the Star of Africa. He weighs a whale's brain and imagines the cattle-dark eyes of Neanderthals. I like these poems, kinetic and half-crazed, they remind me that poetry is an explosion, that energy plus mass equals a dark magic.

Like most publishers, we at Brick Road Poetry Press list submission guidelines on our website. Additionally we go beyond the guidelines to include lists of "characteristics we like" and "characteristics we dislike." In Damnatio Memoriae, the winner of the Brick Road Poetry Prize, Michael Meyerhofer gives the impression of having gone down that list to check off each item one by one with almost every poem in the collection. As to the characteristics we dislike, he avoids them all including no "intentional obscurity or riddling," no "highfalutin vocabulary" or "lack of recognizable theme or...

In a land haunted by the legacy of dead dragons, Rowen Locke has been many things: orphan, gravedigger, mercenary. All he ever wanted was to become a Knight of Crane and wield a kingsteel sword against the kind of grown horrors his childhood knows all too well. But that dream crumbled-replaced by a new nightmare. War is overrunning the realms, an unprecedented duel of desire and revenge, steel and sorcery. And for one disgraced man who would be a knight, in a world where no one is blameless, the time has come to decide which side he's on.

Rowen Locke has achieved his dream of becoming a Knight of the Crane, and he now bears Knightswrath, the legendary sword of Fayu Jinn. But the land remains torn, and though Rowen suffers doubts, he would see it healed. His knightly order is not what it seems, though, and allies remain thin. When Rowen and his friends seek an alliance with the forest-dwelling Sylvs, a tangle of events results in a midnight duel that teaches Rowen a dangerous lesson and leaves him with a new companion of uncertain loyalties. The sadistic Dhargots still threaten the kingdoms, but another menace lurks in the...