In the Bone-Cracking Cold

Artfully wrought poems tracing the intimate contours of self, nature, and history.

Immersed in the rugged beauty and complex history of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, M. Bartley Seigel steers his second poetry collection through the terrain of the tangible and the mythical to capture the essence of the region’s mining towns and dense forests and the vastness of Lake Superior. Through a cumulation of sonnets, prose poems, and open forms, In the Bone-Cracking Cold unfolds across a year, beginning and ending in winter. Seigel carefully weaves and unravels the complexities of love and loss, the legacy of colonialism, and the deep bond between nature, people, and place. Poems like ＂Beach Glass＂ highlight Seigel’s lyricism, while his series of sonnets and a variety of open forms reveal joyfully flexible innovation. With a voice that is both striking and unpretentious, Seigel’s poems remain hopeful regardless of uncertainty and curious despite the threat of apathy, inviting readers to connect with a landscape as iconic as it is misunderstood.

M. Bartley Seigel is a former poet laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. His poetry frequently appears in literary journals such as Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, About Place, The Fourth River, and THRUSH. He lives with his family on the Keweenaw Peninsula, Ojibwe homelands and Treaty of 1842 territory, where he teaches at Michigan Technological University.