Michael Poage's An Incident That Might Lead to Something is a book of the familiar and strange, the collection beginning with the death of his father, and then journeying to many distant locations: Mostar, Split, Dante's house in Florence. Even in these "other" places, there is always something to make the strange familiar for the reader: in Diocletian's Room in Split, Croatia, for example, the narrator tells us about a country "across the mountains . . . shaped like the live human heart." In "Mostar Walk After the War," the persona walks on a quiet Sunday afternoon and sees "new buildings/And those still with shrapnel marks/And missing walls." In all these poems, I felt like I was walking in a strange place with a guide who was pointing out what really matters.
-Brian Daldorph, Coal City Review
Michael Poage's poetry moves us in uncomfortable directions. From the passing of a father to becoming a parent, these poems sing, dance, and mourn. We are all of space and time, galaxies and stars, and quiet morning walks. An Incident That Might Lead to Something is part memoir and passage of time, and part spiritual exploration. Poage expresses the weariness we all feel at times like these, the vulnerable cry of a child seeking reassurance. But there's a traveler's optimism here too, and an incandescent joy in the comfort of coffee with friends and slow afternoons in the sunshine.
-April Pameticky, River City Poetry
"In An Incident That Might Lead to Something, Michael Poage does indeed begin with an incident: officiating at his own father's funeral after bargaining with the widow "to obtain possession/of his body." Poage then proceeds to lead us to numerous somethings with a series of deftly constructed short poems, much like the dots of color used by Seurat and Signac to assemble the larger vision of things. Poage's word choices are reflective of his ministerial years delivering homilies of comfort to the bereaved, the suffering, while, at the same time, infused with a sense of observational immediacy that engenders the questions, What can we do? How can we help? and the closing brief but poignant thought: "Of/all things//I never/thought//my heart/would be/the problem." This is a book to heal hearts, to "seek/some negotiation for peace, for an end/to unquiet losses, something to make you smile." And this, indeed, is well
worth the trip."
-Robert L. Dean, Jr., author of The Aerialist will not be Performing and At the Lake with Heisenberg.
