REFUGEE by Erika Michael

In Erika Michael’s impressive book Refugee, she does more than memorialize her family’s persecution in Austria for their Jewish faith. While Refugee shows the tremendous loss, brutality, and injustice of it all—the poems also bear witness to moments of resilience and joy. While the book itself raises questions of memories and their allusiveness, what is never in question is the truth of feeling surrounding those memories. Refugee blends oral history, songs, and family archival detail to such a degree that readers will feel transported to the locale of each poem. The result is a tremendous accomplishment of faith, memory, and lyricism.   

—Charlotte Pence, Mobile Poet Laureate and author of Code 

Erika Michael’s Refugee ushers us into a Jewish early childhood in Vienna as the Third Reich rises and takes hold. Her poems then carry us west to new beginnings that millions would never access. We’re drawn, by her pulsing music of necessity, on through a life imbued with gratitude and a keen feeling of the miraculous. The senses are alive in these poems of moments that might easily have never been. Refugee bristles with the utter unlikelihood of a family’s American life. Erika Michael, “shabby kid with memories of flight,” renders a destroyed world breathing, laughing, murmuring prayers passed down centuries…reminding us love survives the forces of annihilation.  

–Jed Myers, author of Learning to Hold and The Marriage of Space and Time