TelescopeSelected Poems

Praise

In a poetic generation that has frequently settled for small answers, Heller’s work insists upon the largest questions.
—Rain Taxi

“Over the past half century, Michael Heller has quietly but emphatically established himself as one of the most masterful poets of a post-Objectivist tradition—indeed, as one of the most thoughtful, lyrical, and philosophically profound of contemporary American poets.
—Mark Scroggins

"To conceive otherwise," says Michael Heller, is the poet’s essential task. No matter if the poem is brief or extended, the line long or short, the setting Manhattan or the Colorado Rockies, a lost Bialystok or an imagined Tibet – what arises from the page is an action of mind, an asking, questing trajectory, tracked with uncanny surety by movement of the poetic line. This is no language-locked adventure, but an impassioned, ethical listening to the mind–and the world–at work in words.
—Susan Tichy

Tone perfect poems – the tone, the scale, note by note, interval by interval – attack on the "gods of ennui and loneliness."
—George Oppen