It is an attempt at reconciling growing up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis with the realities of PrEP and 21st Century LGBTQ+ culture. It is about finding personal balance in the face of the limits of gender and sexuality. This is a book for anyone who has felt out of sync with mainstream cultures, queer or not. —Michael J. Wilson
Michael J. Wilson warns us “F*cking is unsafe” —as is love, as are public expressions of love in a homophobic world. The poems in ‘If Any Gods Lived’ deliver to us the brutal complexities and emotional realities of intimacy and AIDS. Elegiac and life-affirming, Unflinching, graphic, and utterly beautiful. —Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout
You can buy If Any Gods Lived at your favorite bookstore, directly from our online store, or Bookshop, Amazon, etc.
Praise for Michael J. Wilson’s previous work:
‘Wilson’s work shines.’ —Publishers Weekly
‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age,’ wrote Dylan Thomas, in lines that kept echoing through my head as I read Michael Wilson’s striking debut…A Child of Storm offers a stark and electric visual palette, as Wilson engages currents historical and personal, natural and made. —Dana Levin, author of Banana Palace
Wilson’s deft, deliberate, graceful poetics form a mesmerizing network of narrative and felt fragments that gain in power and resonance…The kinetic inventiveness of form and voice traverses a truly alluring structural path, and reward the reader with an addictive lyric hybrid of the historic and the intimate. —Quintan Ana Wikswo, author of A Long Curving Scar Where The Heart Should Be
Michael J. Wilson lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he writes for an arts and entertainment company. If Any Gods Lived is his second book of poetry.
