Eyes Like Broken Windows

Seth Michelson's debut full-length collection of poetry, Eyes Like Broken Windows, comprises poems of struggle. But this is also a collection of great power and language. There is shattered beauty everywhere. It is a collection in which tumors become roses, in which traffic accident victims gasp saintly visages like some 14th Century Giotto, in which a woman cures the infirm with her hands like a modern day Christ. It is a collection where death begets life, where the parasitic fig tree eventually strangles its host "in parched darkness," but in the end "will have itself become a host / to an orchestra of new creatures: / green parrots, toucans, fruit bats and silver monkeys." Michelson's family ties to Argentina, his time lived there, and his award-winning translations of its poetry have deeply informed the crown of sonnets around which this collection revolves.