Why the Will to Punish?

"Michael Poage's work as a pastor has led him to travel the world as a trauma counselor, working against the death penalty, doing community development, and participating in social justice work in America and overseas. His poetry has the same passion for social justice around the world. His persona in the work is personable, chatty, musing, self-deprecating, charming, but underneath the ease of apprehension in this accessible poetry is the powerful current of a passion for human connection, justice, and love as the basis of human society. His work seeks to find the general human context and analogue for his own family's migration, trauma, and suffering, to put his family's story into conversation with own lifework in helping historical traumas heal or at least scab over in the hearts of their victims. As Michael says himself, "I believe I can emphasize and underline the mystery - the imagination - at work through large and small influences in our daily human lives that take us into the very heart of powerful, transforming, and compassionate language and music that, if not life-saving, might give hope and new breath to a world suffocating for the lack of making even one poem." It is a laudable vision of poetry."

-Tony Barnstone, poet, translator
Michael Poage was born in Virginia. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and an MDiv from San Francisco Theological Seminary. This collection, WHY THE WILL TO PUNISH?, is his fifteenth book of poetry. He served as the Poet-in-Residence at Dzemal Bijedic University in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina, 2017-18 and received a Fellowship to virtually teach English language and literature at Walailak University in southern Thailand, 2021-22. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife, Dr. Gretchen C. Eick.