Michael Rothenberg’s poetry observes & rages, loves & despairs, gets tender, gets resigned, deals with all the emotive intermittence musically, makes big buzzing soundscapes of protest & short lyrics of dignified beauty have equal space, and looks to explore the world rather than reduce it to bites of judgment. The poems in his Wake Up and Dream strike me as written, imagined, lived, and built all at once, in time & on a remarkably human scale. They’re steeped in the emotional range and depth of an experienced consciousness working hard and long in that zone where the so- called practicality of linear representation runs into the impractical necessity of resisting that narrow take on reality by exploding it, visibly and invisibly, with ferocity and kindness.

–Anselm Berrigan