to be completely honest, this book just did not hold my attention. there were a couple moments that were interesting or compelling, but overall, completely forgettable.

I did end up liking it and reading through it fairly fast. Nothing stuck out or was really memorable though. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve read it, and I couldn’t tell you one specific thing I liked.

I remember thinking it was good though, so I may need to reread it to see if something sticks.

Powerful, moving and reflective. I went into this collection unsure what to expect since I have never interacted with the author before but I was blown away and moved so deeply. It's such a well-thought-out collection.

Poetry is subjective so I always have a hard time rating poetry collections.

in this case, I generally enjoyed the poems, so it's a solid collection for me. parts i + ii fell a bit flat for me. part iii was more effective and i enjoyed the mentions of nature and the overall vibe of the poems. i say this in the most serious way - you can tell that someone from the pacific northwest wrote this - so i can see why some folks might not enjoy it as much.

Pacific Power and Light contains some heavy poems, but they were overall fairly easy to read and interpret. I loved the cover as well. I would read more from this poet.

I was really excited to read this poetry collection by Michael Dickman who is a fellow pacific Northwestener and on several levels it delivered.

This collection feels so Portland in some of the best but also not so best ways. It’s kooky, playful, and weird. It’s rooted in the diachotomies of nature and civilization, beauty and wonder next to the uglier parts of humanity.

Portland and much of the PNW is just that. Especially thinking on post-COVID Portland but also the ways heroine, meth, and now fentanyl have destroyed so many lives here.

This poetry collection encompasses so much of these realities and I felt like I recognized some of his intentions here. Standouts to me were “To My Mothers Dogs” “Safety Pins” “Burnside” “Willamette” and “Rainbow Salmon”.

In other ways it felt like a poetry collection that sounds smart in being hard to follow in some of its eccentricities so we laud it as such. In some ways this made me want to push back and ask if it was really working and that perhaps I wasn’t missing something but the collection/poems themselves.

I’d still recommend this collection especially for those that know the PNW and especially Portland (his Potrtland neighborhood poems were great). I think for those that like gritty and quirky poetry would also enjoy this collection.

Do you read poetry? What poets or styles do you prefer? Also I love poetry recs!

Thank you @netgalley and @aaknopf for this ARC! this is out now!
#pacificpowerandlight #netgalley

This book showed a unique and interesting perspective and I would consider this book to be a look into an individual's thoughts and observations about the world around them. I definitely felt like the poems were patchwork collections of these thoughts and perspectives more than they were cultivated poetry, though maybe not the most emotionally evocative pieces of writing I have read.

I feel like this poetry wasn't exactly meant for me. I'm not sure exactly what my issue with it was (perhaps some of it went over my head?) but I just couldn't figure out what the author was trying to communicate or what the points of these poems were. They all just kind of felt like thoughts put down on paper, which is fine, but the language used was also a bit hard to follow. I was struggling just to figure out the imagery and what each line meant, let alone derive emotional meaning from them.

Always interesting to read poetry written in new-to-me styles, I'm just not sure this one worked for me (but it totally might work for others!).

These poems feature a restless eye, a constant movement between sound and image, and an equally constant movement between the beautiful and queasy. In one poem, Dickman writes that "Natural light/ Heaves into a Glad bag" and that pretty much sums up the poetic experience here: the poems are full of light and clear observation, but part of that clarity of observation takes you right down into the grim and grimy, and the speed is fast. The ragged line breaks help create that sense of unexpected rise or plummet, as they weave between very short lines and much longer ones, trying to patch together the cascade of images. There's a lot to take in, and the experience of reading these poems is a very active one. I enjoyed the ride.

Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc. My opinions are all my own.

I may not be the audience for this collection. I couldn't connect to any of the poetry/imagery. I felt it was all very scattered.

Really loved the intricase of these poems and their ability to have you looking at a regular normal world and it’s people. They were emotionally beautiful.

I love to read the works of authors who are from my region, and this one does not disappoint, The poetry flows smooth and swift. The local locations are scattered like bread crumbs through the poems, in such a way that it doesn't distract from the images being built. My favorite lines where:

“Grandma Lion
Long fingers and long
Legs stretch out
For a drink in the goldenrod”

All in all, it was a good read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC!

Reminiscent of Mark Nowak’s "Shut Up, Shut Down," albeit it without the strict documentarian impulse, Michael Dickman’s "Pacific Power & Light" is intensely interested in place—not merely geography, but how it is occupied. This is a book about the joys of nature and how people sully them.

These poems aspire to a kind of pure materiality, and they convey a joyous, naturalistic hedonism. They are populated with insects, plants, fish, and every form of life one can imagine. The only deterrent to this life, it would seem, is the antagonism of human intervention. For example, in “Rainbow Salmon,” we read:

"Nothing ever happens how you want it to

Eating air
Breathing through disease and glucose
Ourselves a load of Pepto Bismol.

We are tricked out in sunlight and sorry for everything"

The poems in "Pacific Power & Light" are comprised of strongly imagistic fragments that often reject formal syntax in favor of a staccato brevity. Normally, I think this approach leads to a feeling of sterility, but here it does something different. Across the poems, meaning is enigmatic while desire is lucid. There are very few lines in which readers can parse a pure idea, but the feeling that emerges is the pulse of memory. These are poems in which the inarticulable ache of nostalgia is left unarticulated, and they are all the better for it.

The rare moments of clarity are interruptions, and they often carry less weight than the lines that cannot be understood. It is as if the narrator suggests a kind of inversion—that “rational” thoughts are the ones that don’t make sense. For example, we read the following in the titular poem:

"Milk teeth on the new fern did you see it? / I want to concentrate on you."

There are sections where humans feel more present, but it’s almost entirely to highlight their destructive impulse. The few references that are more overtly positive suggest either a kind of transience or similarity to the natural world. The beautiful is not that someone can behold a flower—it is that they can be like a flower.

Ultimately, the book culminates in a series of poems sharing the title “All Fucked Up,” and this is where we find the most explicit tension between the pleasures of nature and its destruction from humankind:

"Over dogwoods
And Ketamine
No comply and the upper
Tributaries"

Readers can choose celebration or self-destruction.

Pacific Power & Light is best accepted as a book you let wash over you, and by the end of the collection, I found myself wanting to experience nature the same way.

I couldn't find my way into this collection. It felt scattered and lacking a grounding theme. Not for me.

The imagery is powerful and engaging, and there’s an openness to the poems that I particularly enjoyed.