Mike White
Mike White grew up in Montreal, Canada. He received a master’s degree from McGill University and a doctorate from the University of Utah. His first poetry collection, How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works), was awarded the 2011 Washington Prize. White’s poems have appeared in journals including The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review. His work is also featured online at Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. He lives with his family in Salt Lake City.
Addendum to a Miracle
by Mike White
Pub: Oct. 15, 2017
Winner - 12th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
foreword by the judge, Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Addendum to a Miracle, Mike White’s second book of poetry, is a collection that explores the shifting borderland between the sacred and the profane. The poems are lucid and often quite spare, focusing upon the ordinary things of this world, yet they pulse with the energy of the unknown, the unspeakable. In poems of a more metaphysical bent, angels appear, only their haloes have come off in the autumn wind and their wings are made of city snow. Poised between humor and terror, White’s Addendum to a Miracle re-envisions the possibilities of grace.
What People Are Saying
“In Mike White’s poems, humanity is a one-by-one, wondrous eventuation, and he presents human beings front and center, in deft portraits which are funny or throbbingly painful or both.”
— from the judge’s foreword
The affirmation of images is first baffling, then beautiful in all directions. A poem, as Mike White keenly avows, looks deeply into surface lights, there to find itself both beheld and born. ‘Now I remember the beautiful bike./Now I can see myself’ … Addendum to a Miracle is a superb collection, ever keeping faith with new creation.
— Donald Revell
When last did I read a poetry collection this good? These are memorable poems, and it seems insufficient to say how and why – ear, heart, mind, language and line, to be sure; also whimsy like Issa’s, rhythmic and syllabic precision as good as Donald Justice’s; the author’s profound and beautifully understated sense of soul and darkness in people, as suggested in Laundromats, by the pool, in the men’s room, and at Sunday school. If you read no other book this year, read this one.
— Carol Frost
White knows and puts into practice the secret of fascination. Addendum to a Miracle is an irresistible book.”
– Sandra McPherson
Excerpt
Addendum to a Miracle
And then, after
asking for silence, and
for silence please, and
for silence way in the back please,
he made of the many fishes
(churning silver
in the brimful baskets)
just one
irrefutable fish, size
of a single loaf of bread,
and the mouths of the multitude
watered, and
the gills of the dying fish
fanned the poison air.
The Waywiser Press