WHAT MAKES US PURPLE by Michael Hill

Michael Hill’s language-rich collection weaves between the delicate rawness of economic stresses, hot moods, honorific love, the vestiges of a family’s faith questions, and the many daily, graceful gratifications of home. Respect and rage and rivalry live in these poems wound like wrestler’s bandages into lessons and rehearsals of adulthood and citizenry. This is not a sentimental set of poems but rather the work reveals graceful structures of strength and sweetness folded into the homestead as life’s training ground. A certain “domestic discomfort,” both internal and external, works alongside an astonishment of affections present on each page.

These poems are steeped in flavor, tasting of genuine, tender, yet muscular closeness. Their territory is built upon intimacy which emerges in the solid grip of images of sons and daughter and wife and father–real life and maturity and the challenges alive for the people in these pages who embody depth and character. Cultural references of time and place anchor this work, charming and meaningful, and remind us of our delicate human animal nature. We are invited right into this writer’s complex yet clear sense of home with all its “meat smells and dog hair,” and we enter willingly, eager to look around and stay awhile, comforted for a brief time against “the world outside the gate.”

–Cindy Bosley, author of Quilt Life and The Siren Sonnets

John Updike famously said that “Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.” This is exactly what Michael Hill does. He takes the every man in his post modern everyday life and cracks him open like a geode, turning him and twisting him under the light of his own personal observations, so that you see not only the luminescence, but also the nicks, scratches, and crevasses.

–Steve Brightman, author of The Circus of His Bones.

I read all the poems in this short collection in one sitting. They are taut, riveting ruminations on family, sonhood, manhood, and fatherhood, filled with “incandescent flashes of being.” In their deep desire for meaning they are compelling and beautiful.

—Rick Bailey, author of Drop and Add, A Novel.