Phases

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Mischa Willett
Poiema Poetry Series · Cascade Books

A Poetry Collection

A debut that treats faith as weather and language as its changing light, Phases announced Mischa Willett as a poet of wit and unguarded attention.

Arranged as a kind of lunar geography—oceans, lands, seas, an island—these poems cover lectern and parish, mall food courts, old loves, a father’s recovery, classical figures, and a dozen Bible stories. They test the edge of speech as readily as they test belief, letting form find the far reach of the orbit’s ring.

Playful and exacting, this striking first collection sings with abandon and refuses easy consolation.

  • Michael Minkoff, Jr.

    Willett articulates our deepest shames and highest longings, and he returns them to us transfigured.

  • Scott Cairns

    Employs surprising linguistic brilliance to compose oratoria that brighten the heart of his reader

  • Kevin Craft

    These poems rub shoulders with classical figures and Biblical traditions, stoics and shepherds and sleep-deprived poets, the better to place the old stories in a contemporary light. I admire the epigrammatic wit, Martial-like in its cutting wryness.

Sample Poems

  • Let us not overlook, he says looking out over
    us from the lectern like a shepherd
    with a crook of words bent on folding
    us back into our pen, or penning
    us back to our fold, the stupidity
    and defenselessness of sheep.
    We bleat: in this analogy, who
    are we? He proceeds. Goats, you
    see, can handle themselves. Horns
    and hoofs, cranial helmets they ram
    full tilt into posts, or other goats. But sheep
    mind you, sheep have no homing device,
    which is why stories begin with a lost one;
    they’re even known to head toward danger
    —oh look, a wolf! Let’s check it out!— in dumb
    allegiance to the interesting, which I find
    interesting, and think: how to amend
    our sheepish ways? But he, to drive
    home both the point and oh ye,
    sighs it’s beyond you; beyond me. 

  • Quiet now, but for camels’ tongues,
    lopping fat and sticky in the young 

    desert night, big wind in the black backdrop
    of sky, crickets and their ancient legs, log-pops

    from my small fire. Cool on my feet,
    this breeze after two days walking since the trees 

    of my village waved their shaggy good-byes. My wool socks
    stuffed in boots, I relax; put a smooth rock 

    under my head, start to dream the dreams of my life:
    I can fly like hawks, have green-eyed wives 

    from the east, am a sailor with a swift ship,
    fish, kingdoms under me, then this: 

    a ladder leaning into clouds, high as sun at noon,
    quick as raindrops, up and down: angels, bright as moon. 

    Then a whisper comes sliding too, down the ricket of the bars,
    promising health, wealth, good luck, descendants like the stars. 

    The fire is dim as voices when the drop                                          
    of my leg wakes me. Blinking, I prop

    on an elbow and look around for stairs, an unnatural
    hint of spirits, but see only my bearded camels, 

    some lights on a hill from town, my boots, provisions.
    I think better of my strange vision. 

    At breakfast I splash oil on my pillow rock--
    it seems holy still-- and get ready to walk, pack 

    everything, give the camels some straw,
    call the place Church to remember what I saw.

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