 Winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize |
BLURBS"Trigger Finger introduces a fresh, quirky voice to American poetry. Or, more accurately, a rang of voices, for Myers is able to inhabit a wide array of characters in her work. The characters are real, and the poet’s compassion for those characters is genuine. ... This poet likes a little grit in her coffee — and she swallows the grounds without flinching. If many of these poems are like photographs, there’s always some dark, blurry menace smudging the print. Idyllic scenes morph into violent nightmare scenarios. The poet doesn’t trust memory’s photographs and stories, and the different versions of truth reflected in them." — Jim Daniels
"The poems in Trigger Finger are quick, tight, smart, surprising — and therefore a great pleasure to read. Micki Myers does a lot of things in this book, but what’s most wonderful is that she never gives you that faux artsiness that Dylan Thomas called “verbal ectoplasm served up to order,” and she’s free of the curiously American disease of self pity. Micki Myers’ work is poetry acupuncture." — Ed Ochester "Trigger Finger has all the spluttering intimacy of snap-shots and Super-8 home movies. Myers’ insightful imagery is precise and riveting. Her subjects — men, women, relationships, violence — are collaged into an artful and dangerous scrapbook." — Denise Duhamel "Micki Myers has produced a chilling echo chamber of staccato, fugal, flattened inner voices. Synapse and syntax have snapped. Emotion has taken its meds. The spell-check doesn’t recognize morality. This is our Spoon River; this is our Waste Land." — Gerald Locklin |