Poetry that bridges the distance between us

From the start, its own genesis, Mike Santora's poems illuminate the multitudes we contain, move through, and have our being in. There is a velocity to these poems, racing along at the speed of life. You'll want to join the poet and with him, "run with any good thing", learning to be reckless in your empathy. Lean in. Listen. You may just hear the beat of your own heart here.

There is a hard-won, gem-like quality regarding the poems in Minimum Safe Distance, Michael Santora's debut collection. Like a crystal, there is both clarity and angular refraction, images both smooth and rough, the world observed, recorded, and reimagined in all its facets from yard sales and dildos to the fluorescent yooperlite. Santora has a keen vision and "a heart as big as a wedding." Read his book!

Minimum Safe Distance traverses gardens, galaxies, and grief, finding lyric wonder in banana peppers, extinct flowers, and Ohio valleys. With humor and tenderness, these poems blur the boundaries between loss and joy, myth and memory, the ordinary and the astonishing. At once elegy and celebration, the collection reveals how carrying our dead, our children, and our failures can also carry us toward flashes of resilience, astonishment, and luminous survival.