Derelict Days in That Derelict Town
“May’s strong, often humorous, unique voice makes the ordinary and rural spaces—the plant life, cigarettes, and rust of Appalachia—surreal and mythic…We feel, ultimately, ‘as if/ anything were possible/ there in the woods far from home.'” —Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot
“The poems in Derelict Days in That Derelict Town may leave you feeling as though Alan May sees things the rest of us walk right past, and afterwards you cannot help but wonder how you missed so much that is right there to be seen, heard, and felt…Alan May’s imagination is a wonderful place to visit, and I kind of wish I lived there.” —Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine
“Alan May interrogates memory and imagination in this collection of arresting days, underscoring how the mundane and ordinary are anything but that, if we will only pay attention. But I’d be remiss if I suggested his poems are somber affairs, dour and dreary. His interrupted narratives are romps of dereliction, full of sly mischief and telling critiques.” —Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems
“The quirky wrapping of these poems peels away to reveal that, against all odds, underneath the everyday horrors of the world, survives a tenderness, alive, capacious, nothing less than miraculous.” —Cintia Santana, author of The Disordered Alphabet
“Southern Gothic meets Office Space where wiffle balls and abandoned shopping malls entangle with encounters with wolves and monsters. In unforgettable poems where allegory and fairy tale blend into the wonder of the untamable, torch-hunted being, we are asked, ‘where is the lovely child / running through the forest where is he / who is miraculously healed?'” —Tyler Mills, author of Hawk Parable and Tongue Lyre
Review of Derelict Days at Chapter 16
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More Unknowns
“To read Alan May’s More Unknowns is to navigate an alluring necropolis in which the signature phrases of our own numbed and bellicose epoch continue signaling through the flames. May’s canny and delicate lyrics remind us that to live in our era is to be proximate to both the technology of violence and its taxonomy; there is no one alive on earth who does not suffer this infernal fluency… Trained in May’s acute and unalarmed gaze, we might be over and not know it, eating at our own profaned alters the dismaying food of the dead.” —Joyelle McSweeney
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Dead Letters
“…Dead Letters is a work of great beauty and force, of intelligence and stark humility.” –Maurice Manning
“Only here, in poems playful as they are crucial, whimsical & heartbreaking… can the instrument burn to be sung, its every breath a gorgeous annihilation.” —Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis
“Melville’s Ahab wanted to ‘strike though’ the pasteboard mask of reality, to whatever was underneath the dead letter of the world. See where that got him. Alan May knows another world, the world such letters make with and out of one another, a visionary, resonant, beautiful world where nothing lurks to lead us away. Dead Letters is a sensuous, lively book, an impressive debut.” —Jake Adam York
“Part Seuss, part Stein, part Brothers (very) Grimm, Dead Letters arrives in a lively blaze of highly accomplished play marking Alan May’s own arrival into the quirky exactitude of his peculiarly fine poetry… Please buy this book & take this ride astride a poetry rich in a nightmarish beauty made of music, image, and vision.” — Hank Lazer
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Notes toward an Apocryphal Text
“[Notes…] presents a new poet whose vivid imagination expresses itself in brilliant juxtapositions of imagery and language. His work has an immediate power and, beneath its often-absurdiste surface, is rich and haunting.” —Bill Knott
“The poems…are carefully measured, stark and moving. It is a strong original poetry.” —Simon Perchik
“Alan May’s poems are taut, intense, weird, and occasionally perverse. They are also unbearably kind, consistently funny… Rarely will you find poetry that is both absolutely spontaneous and inherently logical, but May manages that dichotomy with deft and surprising turns of phrase, and with a ferocious resistance to the realm of the safe, the expected, the blandly poetic. In short, this is a poet with an uncompromising individuality. Readers who venture into this collection should do so with a high sense of adventure and with a healthy appetite for risk.” —Inman Majors
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Free e-chapbook: Everyday Monster
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