“The remarkable poems in Michael Dechane’s The Long Invisible do not shy away from the ambitious task he sets himself: ‘Say the burning unsaid thing.’ These are poems that are not content with the obvious or the easy; they are chronicles of ‘the torn, spun world,’ where encounters with another can feel like ‘a perfect absence.’ Still, Dechane’s poems never wallow in despair. Instead, the poet does the hard work of discovering in loss the possibility of transformation: ‘I have seen / new colors bloom / in its collapse.’ Dechane eschews sentimentality, but never abandons his belief that meaning can be found ‘in this present dimness.’ What makes these poems such worthy companions for the journey ahead is the generosity of Dechane’s vision. ‘Imagine a new city / with an old village / in its heart,’ he writes. We want to follow him there.”
— Margaret Mackinnon, author of The Invented Child and Afternoon in Cartago
“In keenly alert and attentive poems, Michael Dechane’s full-length debut, The Long Invisible, reaches into nature and place, capturing all that fills the senses: ‘even the door left / open, how it touches / its latch bolt softly / upon the strike plate…tap and tap and tap / like a slow heart / still learning to abide.’ These clear-eyed, lyric meditations take the reader from the dissolution of a relationship, through a time of grounding focused on fond memories, then to a new relationship and the art of being fully present in the here and now. Poem after beautiful poem, The Long Invisible takes quotidian moments and makes them visible, wondrous, and worthy of the reader’s attention.”
— Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, author of Common Grace
“Each time I turn to Michael Dechane’s The Long Invisible, I have to remind myself that it’s his first book. A debut so wise and searching, so finely crafted and convincing, is rare indeed. This one, full of elegies and praise songs, recalls Jack Gilbert as it maps the human heart with aching acuity and James Wright as it renders the natural world in a revelatory lyric somehow both lush and spare. Its speaker is full grown in the best sense, with a keen awareness of what’s at stake in the smallest, most ordinary moments and the capacity to attend to the seismic shifts—the endings and beginnings—that lend a life weight and meaning. In fearless but delicate pursuit of usable insight into the distances between self and other and the bridges that sometimes span those gaps, the collection starts with loss and ends with new love. ‘Sometimes,’ the poet writes, ‘we have to begin again,’ and while there is grief here, there is also hope. Dechane offers us, in particular, the hope that saying ‘the burning, unsaid thing’ can help us keep what’s vital, survive our losses, and begin again as many times as we must.”
— Melissa Crowe, author of Lo and Dear Terror, Dear Splendor
“In the poem, ‘Spring Dictation,’ nature’s personified voice declares, ‘May beauty confront you,’ which is the case throughout Michael Dechane’s rewarding debut collection. Made mellifluent by heightened language and seemingly genuine emotion, The Long Invisible is personal without being gratuitously confessional, yet engagingly universal via its sometimes dark odyssey of remembrance and sometimes incandescent flights of fancy—the poet’s leitmotifs being aptly, continually carried by elegant lines thus: ‘Into the barest beginning / of a breeze, one heron luffs.’”
— Claude Wilkinson, author of Marvelous Light
“In The Long Invisible, Michael Dechane presses language to fathom the obscure waters of human relationship, to sound the still depths beneath our perplexing voyage that can so often appear to be solitary. To dwell with these poems is to find a companionable voice—a lovely and consoling music—to accompany our own difficult passages. At the heart of these poems is a hunger to apprehend an intimacy that belies our apparent isolations.”
— Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems
