I am looking for something still more mysterious: for the path you read about in books, the old lane choked with undergrowth whose entrance the weary prince could not discover.
--Alain-Fournier
The poems and prose poems of Michael Estabrook remind us in a real and charming way that Freudian psychology was designed to be hilarious. These poems cheerfully dissect death, lust, and neuroses with energy and false innocence, telling us stories of French accents and stringy grey flesh, reminding us of how funny it is that we are all doomed to die.
Michael says, "Working hard on genealogy these days, trying to find my place in the grand scheme; also trying to finish about a thousand poems begun over the past couple years, and get a real book of poems published, entitled "A Superlative Woman" (about my wife).
"The summer's gone, but in a way for me that's good, I had a dorsal lumbar spinal fusion operation 6 weeks ago and I am still smack in the recovery of that. Toughest thing I ever went through in my life, still on heavy pain medication so I know it could be worse! You see all these surgeries on TV, the plastic surgery and whatnot and people act like it's so simple and common and everyday and it is obviously but if you ask me it is not something to be taken so lightly. I had a great doctor and support health care professionals and the best medicine etc., and it was still so hard to get through, makes you think again about people getting smashed up in cars and stabbed in fights and blown up in Iraq. Can't even imagine how those uncontrolled situations are managed by the people who have to get through them." Drop him a line at mestabrook@comcast.net.
Michael's works here at Unlikely Stories are:
2003:
2 Crows at the Side of the Road
Boxes, Baskets and Masks
Strangest Thing Really
the Staten Island Ferry