Next! (new poems) by Michael Gottlieb

Description

Next! (new poems), by Michael Gottlieb
Poetry/Literature   ISBN 978-1-946104-68-7
Published 2025

Next! (new poems) is the much-awaited collection of Michael Gottlieb’s latest poems, joining Selected Poems (2021), Collected Essays (2023), and Collected Memoirs (2023) in matching format and design, making this the fourth volume in Chax Press’s standard edition of this revelatory poet’s work. While, as a first-generation Language School poet, his radical yet accessible work deeply interrogates language, as well as focusing on New York City, an eternal subject for him, the fundamental questions he’s been asking for decades are what does it mean to be a poet and how do we live our lives as poets?

Michael Gottlieb has been on a mission to unpack the life of the poet. The beautifully rendered poems of Gottlieb’s Next! do the hard work of reflecting and distilling for us these joys and struggles: heaping portions / of just what / we knew / we didn’t deserve… Keep these poems close by in case of emergency. — Rob Fitterman

Michael Gottlieb’s new collection of poems, Next!, begins with a rumble. It’s all here, from the law court to the capitol. “the difference/between pest/and pestilential”. Roman emperors, petty tech bros. “Everything Has To Go”. These metrically precise and chiseled poems carve a space that is needed in these times. Gottlieb is firing on all cylinders, at the top of his game. Go to these poems. They wait for you. — Vincent Katz