"Philip Hammial’s Detroit and Selected Poems is riddled with daring and chance. The voice, though well traveled—‘Rotterdam, Mombasa, Odessa’ or ‘Gdansk, Haiphong, Caracas’—seems, through playful juxtapositions of language and knowing humor, always located in Detroit. The characters of the poems, such as the ‘opener of a bear’s eye’ or monks who make ‘the sound that carries your mother home,’ dare to stare into ‘the face of Death.’ Hammial’s poetry transports the reader through an interior world where object and memory become metaphor, and, in the end, he leaves us like his speaker ‘in the maze blowing.’"—Yusef Komunyakaa
About the Author
Philip Hammial is an Australian American poet born in Detroit. He has published thirty books of poetry and is a sculptor of distinction. Hammial was a member of Woodford Bush Fire Brigade 1995-2003 and fought fires that raged through the Blue Mountains. He is the winner of various important literary prizes.
October 2018