Michael Morse

Michael Morse was born in New York City and raised in Roslyn, New York.  He earned a BA in English from Oberlin College and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first collection of poems, Void and Compensation (2015), was a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Prize.

Of Void and Compensation, Catherine Barnett writes, “The tenderness of a man’s trials—trial as in inquiry, experiment, ordeal, worry—rigmaroles with sheer musical bravura in these poems ... I love the indecision that allows the deepest human truths (doubt, desire, hope, regret) to draw a ‘promiscuity of maps. The speaker in these poems is equal parts lost and found, beautifully so.” Poet Maureen N. McLane adds, “Morse’s astonishing centerpiece poem—(Poem as Aporia Between Lighthouses)—establishes him as a worthy successor to, among others, Wallace Stevens. Open to history, geography, to the birds in the air and the names of teams on jerseys, these poems are discursive yet leashed, wide-ranging yet poised. Morse gives us a mind at work, and a heart plugged in.”

A recipient of fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and numerous residencies, he lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and The Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He is a poetry editor at The Literary Review.