This chapbook, Michael Dickel's third book of poetry, collects poems written during and in response to the Israel-Gaza war in the summer of 2014. The poems evoke a resistance to the violence, and are acute observations of the effects on family and daily life – from the provocations before, through the devastating loss of human life during attacks on Gaza, and past the line of failed cease fires. The incongruence of daily life continuing as war rages is closely observed as the poet witnesses his young son's own response and considers the question of the future we want versus the one that seems to be coming. “Michael Dickel’s new book is an explosive tour de force. From Breaking News to all that shivers beneath the surface, it takes us on a visceral ride as the rockets are falling through screaming surfaces, tunnels cease fires and death tolls; rocketing all night through missiles, mortars, sensors, sirens, shadows and eclipses, shelters and hope. As night slopes through shivers of light, War Surrounds Us will rocket your world with an escalation of unprecedented gravity.” — Adeena Karasick, author of This Poem (Talonbooks, 2012) and The Medium is the Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2014)
Laura LaMarca interviews Michael Dickel about his life, poetry, War Surrounds Us, and his involvement with 100 Thousand Poets for Change (http://www100TPC.org). The poem, "Again,: from War Surrounds Us, is also featured.
Read it here: http://bit.ly/1GdJxjC
LET’S GET LIT: ‘War Surrounds Us’ – The poetry of Michael Dickel (http://bit.ly/1JQJb25), is a podcast of a a TLV1.FM online-radio interview broadcast May 1, 2015. Ilene Prusher interviews Dickel about poetry, his new book, War Surrounds Us, and flash fiction. Dickel reads three poems from War Surrounds Us.
Three of Michael Dickel's poems have been published on MARGUTTE: Non-rivista online di letteratura e altro under the title of Sound, music, mystery (http://bit.ly/1JQKVIG). Two of the poems—Landscapes (re-titled Broken Mirrors) and Here Does Not Live in Me—appear in War Surrounds Us. As a bonus, there is also an interview with Dickel.
Two of the poems and the interview are translated into Italian by Sylvia Pio for the same journal, as Suono, musica, mistero (http://bit.ly/1JQMlCS). Landscapes (in the book as Broken Mirrors), one of the translated poems, also appears in War Surrounds Us.
