Selected Proverbs

"Selected Proverbs" was the winner of the Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award in 2016. Contest judge Seth Brady Tucker had this to say about it: "Michael Brooks Cryer's poetry comes to us riding on static radio frequencies, channeled through the ether of our discontents and our vices; voices that purr and screech and caution us not to look away, but acknowledge that language is mutable, that 'In the beginning, the word was misused like a rag is misused when stopping up the mouth of a hostage.' We hear his epistles loosed by an array of voices, their visions cloudy and clear, strange and comforting; they show us 'a gurney screech[ing] by with a ballerina on it,' they ask us to pay attention and listen. These poems are assured, lively and filled with a caustic wit, and Cryer plays his poems like 'a bed of strings where [he] condition[s] your mood.' Let these sequences melt like wax candles over your ham radio, put your ear to the leather ear pads, listen to this important voice."