Dismantling the Hills

Michael McGriff was born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon. He has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation, and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the translator of Tomas Tranströmer's The Sorrow Gondola, and his work has appeared in Slate, Agni, Field, the Missouri Review, and Poetry, among other publications.

The poems in Dismantling the Hills are love songs to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, to its small towns and its people, to its wildness: 'the dust of stars, the grain of timber, / the burls in the hearts of men.' Distinguished by their masterful craft and human sympathy, these poems constitute not just an unusually fine and readable first collection, but an evocation of place and spirit worthy of comparison with such American classics as Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs and Frost's North of Boston.