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Ghost Hunting Glaciers
Selected by Alberto Ríos for the Grayson Books Poetry Prize, February 2026 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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River, Amen
Homebound Publications, April 2023 Winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry! What the judges had to say: "Garrigan’s ecological poems of Northern Appalachian waterways combine the poet’s experiences as a naturalist, angler, and bio-philosopher to make varied and memorable poems that celebrate the region, the sacredness of place, and poetry-making that sings with beauty and wildness.” |
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Robbing the Pillars
Homebound Publications, July 2020. The headwaters of Robbing the Pillars begin deep in the anthracite country of Pennsylvania and wind their way through mountain tributaries before reaching the Susquehanna River. These poems venture out west through smeared Nebraskan skies, up wild Washington waters, and into the Siskiyou Mountains as meteors split the sky on fire. They traverse the wet woods of Maine along the West Branch of the Penobscot River to the peak of Katahdin. They hike the Appalachian, Continental Divide, and Pacific Crest Trails. In the early coal mines of Pennsylvania, miners crawled into the deepest parts of the mines, set dynamite, and blew joists holding up walls in hopes of getting the last valuable rock before the mountain collapsed -- robbing the pillars. The poems in Robbing the Pillars are the dynamite, the pillars, the rock, the mountain, and the miners. They embrace terrains familiar and forgotten -- those which have been stripped and left to become wild again. They explore the physical (geological, riverine), familial, personal, and cultural landscapes of our world as we rob its pillars. |
Broadsides
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I wrote "River Theology" in honor of the conservation efforts that have worked to establish wilderness areas and wild & scenic rivers. Specifically, this poem was written during my Artist Residency in The Bob Marshall Wilderness where I stayed in a cabin for two weeks along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. This river was supposed to be dammed, but thanks to the efforts of many people and organizations, it was protected and is still a free flowing wild river. You can purchase a limited edition (only 25 printed) broadside (signed & numbered) through the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation with all the proceeds going to the organization and in support of the Artist in Residence Program or directly through me. 11X17
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To celebrate the official release of Robbing the Pillars, I have collaborated with the incredibly talented Grace Kominsky to design two art prints (broadsides) featuring the title poem. The prints are 6”x8", signed, and perfect for framing.
Chapbooks
Songenizios: Poems Inspired by Songs (co-written with Andrew Jones) - June 2020, Competent Backstop (Amazon)
What I Know [How to Do] - Finishing Line Press, October 2019
