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I write and teach along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. I love exploring the riverlands with a fly rod and believe every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. My writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Flyfish Journal, River Teeth Journal, The Hopper Magazine, North American Review, Gray's Sporting Journal, The Drake Magazine, and various anthologies and magazines. I am the author of three poetry collections - Ghost Hunting Glaciers (Winner of the Grayson Books Poetry Prize), River, Amen (Winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry) and Robbing the Pillars - and was the Artist in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness. My writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Spiritual Literature, Best Small Fictions Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to order a signed copy of a book, schedule a reading, or go fishing or wander around the riverlands with me.
Some Recent Publications
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Winner of the 2025 Grayson Books Poetry Prize! Ghost Hunting Glaciers was selected by Alberto Ríos.
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In Ghost Hunting Glaciers, the world is both ancient and immediate, full of thaw and return, silence and voice. These poems map the intersection between the human and the elemental, where memory drifts like weather and language becomes a form of light. Through the precision of image and the patience of listening, the poet creates a landscape that feels simultaneously mythic and intimate glaciers that hold not only ice, but history, breath, and the ghost of everything that once was water.
What distinguishes this collection is its moral weather: the poems do not seek to conquer the natural world but to converse with it. They ask what it means to witness loss without despair, to honor what disappears while still believing in what remains. Every page glows with quiet astonishment, with the recognition that the lyric, like the glacier, moves slowly but changes everything it touches. This is work of extraordinary vision and craft—spacious, humane, and luminous in its attention to the living world. -- Alberto Ríos, author of Every Sound is Not a Wolf In Ghost Hunting Glaciers, the natural world happens twice, once as we enter it with the body and once as we honor its mysteries through language and the imagination. A poem, for Garrigan, is hardwired to mythmaking, to all the characters and swervings of perception that an eco-epistemology demands. Here lies a book charged with an unapologetic appreciation for a wilderness that stirs within us all. --Michael McGriff, author of Inquest and Angel Sharpening its Beak Michael Garrigan’s stunning collection Ghost Hunting Glaciers invites us to embody the bodies, minds, voices and sensory worlds of black bear, waters of “stone swimmers,” an elk that blurs the lines of living and dead, an adventurous female speaker, and the land herself. Freed from its physical body, “Dead Elk” appears throughout the collection, speaking in haunting images that permeate the living world with “wildflower lungs” and “his skull catching a little moonlight.” This is a poetic voice we need—Garrigan’s imagery and music grows from intimate and lived knowledge of land and rivers, but also from a love that imagines into a rich sensory world far beyond a limited human perspective. Garrigan’s generous and richly imagined poems are like the spirit of Dead Elk whose bones are “planted with this final upright act; / little lights keeping us from trampling our tenderness.” -- Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on Coal and Singing Under Snow |
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