Low Static Rage
Poems by Michael Haeflinger
About the Book
Whether in the alley, in the woods or out the back door, the poems in Michael Haeflinger’s debut collection create a soundtrack to a world thrumming with unease. They inhabit spaces between stations on the radio dial and ask readers to lean-in and listen for it: the quiet rage building around us. Haeflinger’s poems channel neighbors who’ll never look each other in the eye, sons lost on mountaintops, and drivers sitting in traffic as the world changes around them. They invite readers to live in the “in-between” spaces they inhabit – where no one knows whether they’re coming or going. Low Static Rage is a dazzling showcase of Haeflinger’s mastery of form, craft and style.
Publisher: Blue Cactus Press
Publication Date: September 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-7330375-0-1
Format: ebook (The paperback edition of Low Static Rage is out of print)
Trim Size: 7.5″ x 5.5″
Category: Poetry
Cover Art: “Polar Vortex” by Michael Bolsinga
Praise for Low Static Rage
“Michael Haeflinger’s Low Static Rage is a meditation on the mundane and the marvelous, a dreamy inventory of the natural world and the fumbling of humankind. These poems double-back on memory, border jump, and sucker punch. Haeflinger reports us back to us with a steady gaze down the alleys, sidewalks,and splintering backroads of America’s broken heartlands while never backing down from the dark.” – Krista Franklin, author of Under the Knife and Study of Love & Black Body
“Haeflinger inspires his reader to consider the gift of place in our lives, the bank drive-thru corridors, mulberry patches, neighborhoods, the last café we met in, as well as flipped concepts of place: nautilus shells, the ocean, a lung, our own bodies hollowed out when we are recognized by memory. These poems simultaneously reflect a devastating world that “manages” despite the “explosions of sand” and nurtures lovers making faces in a photo booth. What a world. It makes me want to write.” – Abby E. Murray, Tacoma Poet Laureate (2019-21) and author of How to Married After Iraq
“In exquisite poems and instructions filled with rage and tenderness, Michael Haeflinger challenges us to consider our connections to the natural world, neighbors, stray bullets, “flat Indiana”, Frankfurt, Hebron, and more. The worlds depicted in Low Static Rage are both familiar and strange, near and far, places where “we never look / into one another’s eyes” yet “don’t seem to understand / why we can’t look away”. – Renee Simms, author of Meet Behind Mars
“A mythic, but literal, strong in detail, earth and sky bound poetry with personal truths and a profound, passionate philosophy… Haeflinger creates a moving fractal of styles in the narrative and lyric modes, using both fractured lines and full-line verse to capture the seriousness of his deed: to document and to provide a testimony of individual life, struggles and successes, to attach his inner world of possibility to the outer reality we all know.” – Albino Carrillo, author of In the City of Smoking Mirrors
“[These] poems ride the tension between the slice of the razor and the bleed. In “Metal Detectors” the persona asks: “What could possibly remain/after all these Saturdays/ scanning the earth? […] what’s found can’t matter.” In Low Static Rage, what’s found matters.” – Kevin Miller, author of Home & Away: The Old Town Poems
“Haeflinger has generously sent us a field reporter’s notes from The Great American Nowhere, the hollow left behind after our phones carved out everything else. A ripe achievement.”– Violet LeVoit, author of I Miss the World and Scarstruck
About the Author
Originally from the Midwest, Michael Haeflinger is the author of two chapbooks, Love Poem for the Everyday (2011) and The Days Before (2014), both from Dog On A Chain Press. In 2016, he released Let’s Don’t Be Crazy, a spoken word and music album. He is the recipient of the Rutgers-Camden Award for Community Engagement (2013), The Amocat Award for Community Engagement (2017), and a Tacoma Arts Initiative Program Award (2015). He is the Executive Director for Write253, a literary arts organization in Tacoma, WA.
