Michael Mlekoday lives near the Salish Sea and teaches high school English at Charles Wright Academy. They are a National Poetry Slam champion, a co-founder of Button Poetry, and the author of two books: All Earthly Bodies (2022) and The Dead Eat Everything (2014).

Other poems by Michael Mlekoday in Verse Daily:
January 20, 2014:   "Self-Portrait with Gunshot Vernacular" "All summer was one wet weapon..."

Books by Michael Mlekoday:

Other poems on the web by Michael Mlekoday:
Three poems
"Kenosis"
"Bobby Hasn't Eaten in Three Days"
from I Think I'm Almost Ready to See the Ocean

Michael Mlekoday's Website.

Michael Mlekoday on Twitter.

About All Earthly Bodies:

"All Earthly Bodies begins 'Even the gaze / is a kind of government.' And that line comes back to me whenever I think of the possibilities of our work, the many places that work must go, and the hard work we must do to get it there. Michael Mlekoday is savvy at the task at hand—the poems in this book break intriguing new ground, each one rollicking with both their grasp of audience and their adroit handling of the line, the inflection, the resounding word. This is distinctly a people's poetry, at once accessible and starkly original."
—Patricia Smith

"'I am trying to let the planet / rename me.' Across this book of many astonishments, Michael Mlekoday cultivates an intimate, generous ecopoetic language of desire and surrender, grief and praise. All Earthly Bodies delves deep into the 'thousand worlds' of the garden, the forest ecosystem, the urban wild, the body and its mysteries, attending to the mutual entanglements and everyday violences of earthly life with intricate attention. Mlekoday's poems offer manifold gifts of renaming beyond boundary and binary, embodying a vital queer ecological vision for our tumultuous days. Read this book and let it transform you."
—Margaret Ronda

"I'm thankful for this wonderful book's hard look at power structures and symbolic white allyship, for its kaleidoscopic lens on gender and inheritance, and for its tender consideration of ecological marvels—that 'peppery / conspiracy of soil and water / to keep the living living.' There is a folksy kindness here meshed with fire and eloquence—a little city-granola, a little greasy, and a lot in love with the world."
—Margaret Ronda