How We Enter the Palace
HOW WE ENTER THE PALACE is a book born of faith and patience. The book has a strong sense of the divine, the larger world where all people, places, events, and knowledge exist, both simultaneously and chronologically. One way the poet accesses that faith is through persona poems in the voices of Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Helen Keller, and other characters who have shown up along the way. The persona poem breaks the barriers of what the poet CAN know and allows her entrance into what others have known. Inevitably, the voices and visions of these mystics slip into all the poems in the book, so the most mundane moment (remembering something stupid from years earlier) becomes a moment of grace.
Michelle Blake wrote a trilogy of mysteries, with Lily Connor, and her chapbook, INTO THE WIDE AND STARTLING WORLD, was selected for the New Women's Voices Series at Finishing Line Press. In 2014, she published a collaboration with visual artist Fran Forman, in which she wrote a series of poems and a fable. She has published poems and essays in MORE Magazine, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Banyan Press Anthology, Cedar Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, Solstice Lit Journal, Cider Press Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Asheville Poetry Review and many other magazines and anthologies.
