Available on April 15, 2025
Spare
Winner of the 2023 Barrow Street Prose Prize
Praise for Spare:
Lewis’ memoir is an elegant and elegiac seminar on class in America, and in her words, what it’s like to be poor in the poorest town in Maine…which is to say, far away from the forces that decide one’s fate and to live in a state that is not just the state of Maine but one of ambiguity. Her prose is sublime in detail and her story urgent. I am in awe. — Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town.
I read Michelle Lewis’ Spare with a kind of awe and fascination for its arrival at the pared down and essential, its achievement of the hardest-thing-of-all in prose: the ability, and willingness, to cut through the dross and gift the reader the things we look for in great poetry. Breath. Space. Uncommon voice. Distillation. The play of meaning within a single term. How much can you “do without”? When “the bottom falls out,” what are you left with? How do you live? Spare traces a family’s, town’s, and region’s generations-long poverty and the violence of systems bent on naturalizing hardship. If no one is spared, Michelle Lewis arrives, at least, to write the truths back into history, to listen and to tell, in a prose that promises in its careful tracings to do no further harm. — Mary Cappello, judge of the 2023 Barrow Street Prose Prize.
Animul/Flame
Winner of the 2018 Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize from Conduit Press
Winner: Midwest Book Prize
Finalist: Maine Literary Award
Praise for Animul/Flame:
Michelle Lewis writes with a candor and urgency that recalls the poems of the late great Jack Gilbert. These commanding poems manage to be both straightforward and associative in their grapples. Take the words you saved and put them here, Lewis writes in lyrical instructions, songs and meditations. Animul/Flame is charged by an emotional integrity that yields exacting bite and insight. This is a marvelous debut. —Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
This is the book that wouldn’t let go of me. I’d return to it intending to read a part and find I couldn’t divide it from itself, that I had to finish each time. While the poems connect and speak to each other, they serve less to tell a story than enact a life, to move through violence and menace and mystery in a search for a language of survival, a way of touching memories and events without succumbing to them again. […] This is a book that devours. —Bob Hicok, judge of the Marystina Stantiestevan First Book Prize
