Michael Schmeltzer was born and raised in Yokosuka, Japan before moving to the US. He is the author of Elegy/Elk River, winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. He earned an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. His honors include numerous Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, and the Blue Earth Review's Flash Fiction Prize. His writing has been published in various journals such as Rattle, PANK, Mid-American Review, and Natural Bridge, among others. Blood Song is his first full-length collection.

Other poems by Michael Schmeltzer in Verse Daily:

Books by Michael Schmeltzer:

Other poems on the web by Michael Schmeltzer:
"Re: Re: Personal Ad #6 (An Egg, Delicate, Repairs The Days Now Cracked"
Four poems
Two poems
Two poems
"Personal Ad #1 (Pairs Only Matter In Poker)"
Three poems
"Elegy/Echo"
"Tsunami"
"Famine is the Name of the Beloved Departed"
"Men Who Pay for Sex"
"Mesrobians Go Thrifting"

Michael Schmeltzer's Website.

Michael Schmeltzer on Twitter.

About Blood Song:

"There is a radical nostalgia at the heart of Blood Song, a nostalgia that recovers the wounds of experience and brings it to a rich, imaginative culmination. In this way, the book's title is profoundly apt: on the one hand, Michael Schmeltzer's poems are about blood and the tragic consciousness that is the result of our being in time; on the other hand, the poems are about song, the reconciling artfulness that is the source of the best poetry. As one of Schmeltzer's canny speakers says, 'I know / better. I'm no better.' Equally unsettling and ravishing, Blood Song is a terrific debut."
—Rick Barot