spuytenduyvil

like a lizard crawling takes us through rites of passage, both tragic and joyful, in a life of awareness and grace. Michael Forstrom writes with the lyric expansiveness of Leaves of Grass; this is a meditation on the spiritual nature of a human being practicing with a fully engaged heart and intellect. A book worth reading and returning to again and again.

                                  Brenda Coultas

 

Sentence by sentence, Michael Forstrom’s like a lizard crawling traverses the range of complexities of our contemporary lives. With spare, compressed paragraphs Forstrom has found a form for exploring the flickering solitudes of suffering and intimacy, the taut surprises of sudden joy. These are Kafka’s parables tuned to the American suburbs, each one a measure of wit, pain, and the promise that meaningfulness is ever at hand.

                                  Richard Deming

 

Michael Forstrom’s like a lizard crawling is a collection of prose miniatures, hesitant, elliptical, narrative and philosophical. A man leaning and thinking in the shadow of the recent death of his wife and then a turning to the other side of the divide, toward life: childhood, family responsibility and love. He begins with the ending and the necessity of an impersonal pronoun: one can, one may, one moves onward, disoriented. Forstrom’s elegant poetic prose is subtle, but stunning, in its reminder of the fragility of life, thought, memory and writing.

                                  Barbara Henning