Glamourous Life
by Michele Madigan Somerville

“If you are heartsick, resisting, spiritually riled, a sinner with a sense of humor, a M.I.L.F or somebody’s child, Michele Madigan Somerville is definitely the poet for you.”

—Jill Eisenstadt

“Michele Madigan Somerville’s Glamorous Life catechizes issues that aggravate our care—addiction, feminism, masculinity, motherhood, religion, sex, and violence. She digresses our divine milieu like a graffiti-covered train rambling over and under neighborhoods, revealing wildly complex economic and ethnic strata, progressing through time emerging miraculously new. While these streetwise poems conversate they surreptitiously dissipate male thunder.”

—Greg Fuchs

“‘It’s a fine line between Iggy Pop and Jesus,’ and Madigan Somerville takes us on a grand cosmic ride on that fine line between the divine and the sacred. Along that ride, Madigan Somerville never loses her sense of humor and never stops having fun. Like all epic poets before her, she flexes her formidable poetic muscles in fearlessly lush language, infusing this collection with a sweeping grandeur of the full length opera as well as the hilarity of burlesque, in which the cast of characters from Cleopatra to Paul Newman struts in a Felliniesque procession, and Love – both cosmic and earthly – is revealed in all its fierce and lusty splendor. The poems in this book are a rare combination of grace, passion, joy, kindness and generosity that reminds us of how miraculous life can be.”

—Joanna Sit

Read excerpts from Glamourous Life