LIMINAL

¶ Liminal is Michael Lee Rattigan’s début poetry collection.

• Michael Lee Rattigan is seeking to pinpoint that ‘other’ voice, for everything that he writes it seems exists only to advance silence, or at least our unmediated access to it—while consciousness is no more than a fine vessel of flesh and blood stretched over the diaphanous musculature of each word; for this poet does not produce a merely verbal language, no, rather he is writing the syntax of listening, the anti-aesthetics of un-naming and sucking back into the lungs the protean impulse of a visible mind. ❧ Paul Stubbs, The Black Herald

• There is a serenity, and a unity, in the way he moves from the general to the specific and back again… does this summon a project of disturbance underneath the lyric repose? A fabulous convergence of sight and sound provides pleasant dissonances. He is conducting away from Joyce’s drunkenness, the central concrete fact of imaginative leaps, in tune with the phonetic value of thoughts in motion, turning more toward the imagistic sobriety of an Octavio Paz or a George Oppen. ❧ Andrew O’Donnell, The Fiend Journal

¶ Michael Lee Rattigan has lived and taught in Mexico and Spain, and translated the complete collection of Fernando Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro poems (Rufus Books, 2007). Other translations have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Asymptote Magazine, The Black Herald, The Fiend Journal, and in Selected Writings of César Vallejo (ed. Joseph Mulligan, Wesleyan University Press, 2015). Before Liminal, Rattigan first published a chapbook, Nature Notes: Fragments for an Elegy (Rufus Books, 2008). More recent poetry publications are Hiraeth (2016) and As Grass Becomes Flesh (2023), both with Black Herald Press.

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