Walking Distance

Michael Heffernan has sustained and amplified a poetry of real intelligence, technical precision, and acoustic splendor. He is surefooted in his craft enough to let imagination run and leap and dance. -- Thomas Lynch, author of On the Road Back to Arcadia

Michael Heffernan’s poems occupy a space in his ordinary life and the world he enters in company with his own multifarious first person singular, who is often talking. When he stops doing that, something may get written down. The poem, then, begins to live in its own place where, for a moment, nothing is ordinary.