This Is What They Say

Michigan’s economic boom and bust murmurs like an omen for a now-struggling America in This Is What They Say, as poet M. Bartley Seigel reminds us, “we are all collapsing stars.” If you listen close, you can hear the secret, untold desires, the “ragged, roiling rage” that emanates from the break rooms and abandoned barns of the upper Midwest. Here is the honest account of lives where “scars are replaced with more scars.” This is how it feels to grow into adulthood in a first-world wasteland: the slow burn of homemade liquor, the bone-deep ache of a cavity, and the keen of metal against glass. This is the moving and tragic strain that comes between families as they attempt to “clasp arms and dive into this thing together, electric and beautiful as bullets,” and This Is What They Say.