Prize Wheel
Small Bites Press
ISBN: 979-8-218-11138-0
A prize wheel, for all its amusement and attraction, relies on chance and offers small wins against losing odds. In her debut poetry collection, Colleen Michaels skillfully and vividly examines the joy, consolation, luck, and con always in play when she heeds the call to “step right up” in matters of work, family, illness, and intimacy. A winning collection filled with risk and reward, Prize Wheel, imagines a world where “…it should matter/the belonging of one/to the other.”
From an American laundress reprimanding Degas, from a child’s butter and sugar sandwiches, from the persona of the New England Smokestack speaking elegantly of her decommission, Colleen Michaels fashions an intelligent, compelling, and far-ranging debut collection. At turns, surreal as well as wildly real, the poems in Prize Wheel are unflinchingly honest.
–Susan Rich, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems
Sometimes if you’re lucky a book is so perfect, so true, so detailed and moving that you don’t want to put it down. The poems stay with you for a long time because they look at the world with such clear and loving eyes. Prize Wheel by Colleen Michaels is just such a book. I love it and I guarantee you will too.
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award winner
The poems in Michaels’ debut collection, Prize Wheel, are as thrilling and dangerous as a carnival. Fanned out into six sections, the book is as breathtaking and as specific as fate; the poems guide us through and out of a funhouse maze, one filled with creativity, costume, danger, and a mother’s love.