Collected Poems 2005–2025 brings together two decades of Michele McDannold’s poetry, a body of work as restless and unyielding as the years it spans. From the back roads of rural Illinois to the wreckage and resilience of American life, McDannold writes with a hard-earned clarity—equal parts bruised and luminous. These poems carry the weight of survival, the raw nerve of intimacy, the dark humor of someone who has seen too much and kept going anyway.
Gathered here are poems from across McDannold’s published collections and chapbooks, alongside new and uncollected work, charting the evolution of a voice that has become both uncompromising and unmistakable. Collected Poems 2005–2025 is not a retreat into nostalgia but a reckoning—an honest, fiercely human record of twenty years in language.
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Richard Modiano reviews Collected Poems 2005-2025 at The Literary Underground’s In Conversation
“There comes a time in life when a writer begins to reflect on the work she’s done in this world. Enter Michele McDannold and her Collected Poems 2005-2025. This is a massive collection of poetry worth owning because no one tells you exactly how it is like McDannold. The poems are relatable, soul-crushing, painfully honest, and more on the side of maudlin than many dare to go. The work is both in your face and quiet. This collection is an inside look at what it means to be human in these dark times, what it feels like to be perpetually in motion both mentally and physically, and still, somehow, want to get up every day and do it again. There is love in here—sometimes sweet, but mostly jaded. It is a collection to keep by the bedside to remind yourself that it is okay to use your voice, to speak when others tell you to be quiet, and to understand that life is hard for all of us. “Do not become the poem/she will treat you/ as an open wound/in a salt factory,” this is what Michele McDannold speaks to, what she has spent her life doing not only for herself, but for others. She gives a voice to her own struggles and pain and paves the way for the rest of us.”—Aleathia Drehmer, author of Little Graveyards (Roadside Press)
Foreword by Dan Denton. Edited by Ezhno Martin.
“In the middle of all the fucked-up things going on in this crazy fucking world, Michele McDannold is still fighting to keep love and hope alive, in her own way, by writing poetry that turns the fuckery into poems of observation and prayer. You can hear the weariness between each line. Smell the hot, moist breath on the desperate primal screams of “why am I the only one that sees this shit?” The cries of “this is fucked. Let’s do something.” The prayers born of a stubborn refusal to give up on love, no matter how many times it has left us bloody and raw.”(from the foreword; By Plane, Train or Coincidence) – Dan Denton, author of $100-A-Week Motel
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review by Michael D. Grover
What can I say about Michele McDannold? I’d probably be biased. She just helps other writers do their thing. Selfless as she needs to be.
I first met Michele over a decade ago. She hired me to be the Poetry Editor at Red Fez. We really met face to face in Toledo, Ohio when we organized a marathon Poetry festival in the six hundred seat theater in the crazy arts center where I used to live.
So we’ve established the fact that I’ve known Michele a long time. Now to the chapbook. I have to say this is easy to pick up, and hard to put down until you’re all the way through it.
I have to say this is Michele as I have never seen her before. Vulnerable, this is a book of love Poems. Raw emotion like exposed nerves.
She walks it like she has learned all these years. Very little wasted motion or breath. I would recommend this to Poets at any level. Please strap yourselves in and enjoy the journey into the space time continuum.
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Point of Departure
–thirty-three poems–
by Michele McDannold
is now available from
COCKLEBUR PRESS!
Purchase a signed copy from Magical Jeep Distributing
Michele McDannold’s ‘Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days’ is the recollection of a young women for whom each moment, breath, event of the day is trapped in memory. She greets sin as common, sorrow as an ally and joy as a mishap. Her poems are elegant in the telling of her innocence. It isn’t that she hasn’t seen the dark side, or been touched in undeserving ways. She has. Somehow she has embraced these moments, allowed herself to dream big and has stepped beyond the constraints of a mid-west up-bringing. Michele’s poems come from those deep places, where secrets hide and she writes them with a fearless heart. –Bill Gainer, author The Mysterious Book of Old Man Poems