ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marc J. Sheehan is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Vengeful Hymns (Ashland Poetry Press), winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, and Greatest Hits (New Issues Press). He lives in Grand Haven, Michigan.

PRAISE

"Limits to the Salutary Effects of Upper-Midwestern Melancholy is in equal parts brazen contemplation and bold celebration of all the great regions of feeling: their Michigan basements, their vast peninsular reaches of grace. This brave gift of a book ruptures and repairs the heart in parabolic waves. The effects of each image, of all of the book’s rhythmic unfoldings, are stunning, haunting, and, I might add, entirely limitless."

- Diane Raptosh author of Human Directional and American Amnesiac

"Perhaps you should just say the title of the chapbook over to yourself – maybe three times, slowly, quietly. You’ll learn something about this poet that way. He makes no false claims of either joy or despair. He knows the limitations of the place where he lives and of his own imagination. There is no easy beauty in Marc J. Sheehan’s Upper Midwest, yet there remains the hope that we can be 'beautifully alone together.'"

- Keith Taylor, author of The Bird-while and If the World Becomes So Bright

"Marc J. Sheehan is a poet in his prime, as these elegant poems make manifest, that the good news is so often enwrapped in the bad.  The title poem ought be learned by heart. The grace of it, heartbreaking, beautiful. The rest, pure gifts."

-Thomas Lynch, author of Apparition & Late Fictions and Skating with Heather Grace