Praise For Trigger Finger

The poems in Trigger Finger are quick, tight, smart, surprising — and therefore a great pleasure to read. Micki Myers does a lot of things in this book, but what’s most wonderful is that she never gives you that faux artsiness that Dylan Thomas called “verbal ectoplasm served up to order,” and she’s free of the curiously American disease of self pity. Micki Myers’ work is poetry acupuncture.

— Ed Ochester

Trigger Finger has all the spluttering intimacy of snap-shots and Super-8 home movies. Myers’ insightful imagery is precise and riveting. Her subjects — men, women, relationships, violence — are collaged into an artful and dangerous scrapbook.

— Denise Duhamel

Micki Myers has produced a chilling echo chamber of staccato, fugal, flattened inner voices. Synapse and syntax have snapped. Emotion has taken its meds. The spell-check doesn’t recognize morality. This is our Spoon River; this is our Waste Land.

— Gerald Locklin

Foreword

by Jim Daniels

Trigger Finger introduces a fresh, quirky voice to American poetry. Or, more accurately, a rang of voices, for Myers is able to inhabit a wide array of characters in her work. The characters are real, and the poet’s compassion for those characters is genuine.

Like many younger poets, Myers uses a wide array of pop culture allusions in her work, but in these poems it’s not all breezy fizzle and nod-nod wink-wink at hip insider jokes in the surfacey land of the post-modern. Her allusions are clearly earned — integral to the world of these characters, and the emotional intensity of the work. Many of the references come from rock ‘n’ roll, but instead of prompting pat acknowledgments of shared references, they force us to revisit the past, and question the present: what are the songs we’re singing around the campfire? Have all our 60’s anthems become dirges? There’s no nostalgia in the use of old song lyrics — Myers uses the old riffs like a defrocked minister might use Bible verses.

This poet likes a little grit in her coffee — and she swallows the grounds without flinching. If many of these poems are like photographs, there’s always some dark, blurry menace smudging the print. Idyllic scenes morph into violent nightmare scenarios. The poet doesn’t trust memory’s photographs and stories, and the different versions of truth reflected in them.

Myers is clearly a wide and skeptical reader, drawing in sources from The New York Times to The Coca Cola News to the Whole Earth Catalogue, from T.S. Eliot to a summer camp brochure. She creates realistic, compelling characters like Kelli the Crack Whore and a cornet player in an Infantry Regiment Band during the Civil War. The result of all this is that she keeps the reader off-balance and constantly surprised. One never knows where the next poems is coming from or where it’s going to go. Finally, at the end of this collection, the reader is left wondering what to do with the Trigger Finger? Is the hand holding a gun, the finger ready to pull? Or is the finger pressing the shutter on a camera? Or is someone pointing that finger at you? At us all?

Winner of the 2001 Pearl Poetry Prize

Selected by Jim Daniels

Pearl Editions, 2003

ISBN: 1-888219-21-1

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© Micki Myers 2013