Background
Anne Michaels was born on April 15, 1958 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is the daughter of Isaiah and Rosalind Michaels.
(A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the L...)
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption. As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679776591/?tag=2022091-20
(In The Winter Vault, award-winning poet and novelist Anne...)
In The Winter Vault, award-winning poet and novelist Anne Michaels crafts a love story of extraordinary depth and complexity, juxtaposing historic dislocations with the most intimate moments of individual lives. In 1964, a newly married Canadian couple settles into a Nile River houseboat moored below the towering figures of Abu Simbel. Avery is one of the engineers responsible for moving the temple above the rapidly rising waters of the Aswan Dam. At the edge of a world about to be lost forever, Avery and and his new wife Jean begin to create their own world. But it will not be enough to bind them when tragedy strikes and they go back to separate lives in Toronto. There Jean meets Lucjan, a Polish artist whose haunting stories of his shattered childhood in occupied Warsaw draw her further away from Avery. But, in time, he will also show her the way back to consolation and forgiveness.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307455769/?tag=2022091-20
(Miss Petitfour enjoys having adventures that are "just th...)
Miss Petitfour enjoys having adventures that are "just the right size - fitting into a single, magical day." She is an expert at baking and eating fancy iced cakes, and her favorite mode of travel is par avion. On windy days, she takes her sixteen cats out for an airing: Minky, Misty, Taffy, Purrsia, Pirate, Mustard, Moutarde, Hemdela, Earring, Grigorovitch, Clasby, Captain Captain, Captain Catkin, Captain Cothespin, Your Shyness and Sizzles. With the aid of her favorite tea party tablecloth as a makeshift balloon, Miss Petitfour and her charges fly over her village, having many little adventures along the way. Join Miss Petitfour and her equally eccentric felines on five magical outings -- a search for marmalade, to a spring jumble sale, on a quest for "birthday cheddar", the retrieval of a lost rare stamp and as they compete in the village's annual Festooning Festival. A whimsical, beautifully illustrated collection of tales that celebrates language, storytelling and small pleasures, especially the edible kind!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1770495002/?tag=2022091-20
(A rare and beautifully produced "accordion" book by renow...)
A rare and beautifully produced "accordion" book by renowned novelist and poet Anne Michaels and acclaimed artist and writer Bernice Eisenstein that will cause a stir for both its form and its content. Anne Michaels's resonant book-length poem--which unfolds on one side of the pages of this accordion book--ranges from the universal to the intimate, as she writes of historical figures for whom language was the closest thing to salvation; on the other side, we have Bernice Eisenstein's luminous portraits of and quotes from such twentieth-century writers and thinkers as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, W. G. Sebald, Anna Akhmatova, Primo Levi, and Albert Einstein. The poetry and portraits join together in a dialogue that can be read in any direction and any order, in a format that perfectly reflects the thematic interconnectedness of this collaboration: "an alphabet of spirits and spirit; an elegy of remembrance" (Eisenstein); "just as a conversation becomes the third side of the page . . . the moment one life becomes another" (Michaels).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307962490/?tag=2022091-20
(Poems of elegy in the aftermath of a great love from the ...)
Poems of elegy in the aftermath of a great love from the internationally best-selling, award-winning novelist (Fugitive Pieces, The Winter Vault) and poet. In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns with strikingly original poems to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of." Here are the ways in which passion must accept, must insist, that "death . . . give / not only take from us." This piercing short collection treats desire in a style that is chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, and almost classical in its precision. In lyrics that ponder what happens to the bodies of lovers--so vital when together, different when apart, death coming to one before the other--Michaels embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. Love's sheltering understanding is a powerful presence in all the poems, with its particular imagery (the ringing fog, the white page of the bed), as is the shattering loss of its end. With Michaels, we enter a space that is "not inside / not outside: dusk's / doorway," where memory might be kept alive.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451493095/?tag=2022091-20
(Prior to her stunning first novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne ...)
Prior to her stunning first novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels had already won awards and critical acclaim for two books of poetry: The Weight of Oranges (1986), which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas, and Miner's Pond (1991), which received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was short-listed for the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award. Although they were published separately, these two books, along with Skin Divers, a collection of Michaels's newest work, were written as companion volumes. Poems brings all three books together for the first time, creating for American readers a wonderful introduction to Anne Michaels's poetry. Meditative and insightful, powerful and heart-moving, these are poems that, as Michael Ondaatje has written, "go way beyond games or fashion or politics . . . They represent the human being entire."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375702253/?tag=2022091-20
(Railtracks is a unique collaboration between two writers ...)
Railtracks is a unique collaboration between two writers of remarkable achievement. A profound meditation on railways, love and loss, at once intimate and committed, it moves from the industrial to the metaphysical, from the tectonic shifts of globalization to the interior pulses of memory, and from the present to a past that still exists in vivid, essential traces. This sensual and exploratory dialogue is accompanied throughout by the evocative photography of Tereza Stehlíková, charting its own atmospheric passage by train through the forested, winter landscapes of Southern Bohemia. Summoning potent, hidden histories and deeply personal journeys, Railtracks seeks, with a rigorous and reflective urgency, to bear witness to the pain of separations and the consolation of meetings. Railtracks is a unique collaboration between two writers of remarkable achievement. A profound meditation on railways, love and loss, at once intimate and committed, it moves from the industrial to the metaphysical, from the tectonic shifts of globalization to the interior pulses of memory, and from the present to a past that still exists in vivid, essential traces. This sensual and exploratory dialogue is accompanied throughout by the evocative photography of Tereza Stehlíková, charting its own atmospheric passage by train through the forested, winter landscapes of Southern Bohemia. Summoning potent, hidden histories and deeply personal journeys, Railtracks seeks, with a rigorous and reflective urgency, to bear witness to the pain of separations and the consolation of meetings.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1619020726/?tag=2022091-20
Anne Michaels was born on April 15, 1958 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is the daughter of Isaiah and Rosalind Michaels.
Michaels graduated from University of Toronto with bachelor's degree in English in 1980.
Anne Michaels’ first book of poetry, 1985’s The Weight of Oranges, appeared while she was still in her twenties. The book explores common poetic themes of love, loss, and human struggle.
Six years later, describing Michaels as a borrower of other lives, Fraser Sutherland remarked in Canadian Literature that in Michaels’ second book of poetry, Miner’s Pond: Poems, “a fine painterly touch is present.” While one poem includes Michael’s brothers, most of the poems in Miner’s Pond portray writers, painters, and others from history, such as the seventeenth-century German astronomer, Johannes Kepler.
Fortunately, notes at the end of the book identify such figures as Russian poets Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Anna Akhamatova; German novelist Alfred Doeblin; Danish novelist Isak Dinesen; and French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir— since not all the names mentioned in the work are familiar to readers.
In 1996 Michaels tried her hand at a novel, Fugitive Pieces; despite the different form she does have her character, Jakob Beer of Poland—a survivor of Nazi persecution during World War II—decide to be a poet. Athos Roussos, a Greek geologist who discovered Jakob, hid him during the war. Roussos raised the boy in Toronto with stories connected to his knowledge of geology. He encourages Jakob to “write to save yourself, and someday you’ll write because you’ve been saved.”
While working on her second novel, The Winter Vault, Michaels released Skin Divers, her third poetry collection and the last of three volumes, beginning with The Weight of Oranges and Miner's Pond. All three were intended to speak to one another, and were later published in Poems (2000).
In 2011, Michaels contributed to the Bush Theatre's 24-hour performance of Sixty-Six Books to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, providing 66 playwrights, poets, songwriters, and novelists - of all faiths and none, from over a dozen countries and across five continents - the opportunity to respond to some of the oldest stories ever told.
Michaels returned to poetry with the release of her book-length poem, Correspondences (2013), an historic and personal elegy in an accordion-style format that can be read frontwards or backwards.
A new collection of poetry, All We Saw, and a new work of non-fiction, Infinite Gradation, were released in 2017.
(A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the L...)
(In The Winter Vault, award-winning poet and novelist Anne...)
(A rare and beautifully produced "accordion" book by renow...)
(Miss Petitfour enjoys having adventures that are "just th...)
(Prior to her stunning first novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne ...)
(Poems of elegy in the aftermath of a great love from the ...)
(Railtracks is a unique collaboration between two writers ...)
Michaels is a member of League of Canadian Poets.