Michael Prihoda

Years Without Room Michael Prihoda

In Michael Prihoda's years without room he is able to distill the beauty and desperation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road by stripping down an already bare landscape into a shoulder-width story that crowds us and pushes us into ourselves in a profound way. Combining short lines of dialogue, abstract landscapes, and emotional fits from McCarthy's masterwork he has created a unique volume of redaction that succeeds wildly in inverting the original text into his own sparse poetry. years without room does exactly what great redaction or erasure can do, it finds the inner voice, the different voice, the haunting voice of the original work and makes us listen to it. -Darren C. Demaree, author of Two Towns Over



Michael Prihoda's years without room is a ballsy collection of poems based on the writing of Cormac McCarthy. In lesser hands this would be foolish but Prihoda is up to the challenge and his language is as sinewy, fiery and Biblical as McCarthy's. Favorite page: 'he felt/years, /claiming him.//possibly/a door'."-Corey Mesler, author of Among the Mensans



Early on Prihoda poetisizes, 'lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast the earth of years without room.' This pretty much sets the tone for the whole book. These poems are really compact stories that thrive in an incomprehensible world- stories that remind us of our brittle humanity. As a whole they present a powerful message that urge us to stay strong and mindful in spite of the difficult news. These are poems worth returning to-words that may just give us some comfort that otherwise would have been absent. . .-Jeffrey Zable, poet/musician