Composed over twelve years, A Collision of Soul in Midair is a vibrant tour of many realms, a nimble flight through wild phantasmagoria, abundance, and the slippery mechanics of meaning. In these poems, fires give lectures on eternity and hand out promotional pamphlets, crows give you one of their ribs after mistaking you for an old testament god, and the year of the pig wants to build you a house of pomegranate seeds and your own naked body. Suitable gifts, all.

With simultaneous journeys through the Chinese zodiac, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and the poet’s life, the worlds of Mike Bagwell’s poems are held together by constraints, linguistic threads, and recurring characters and motifs. The zodiac offers prognostications on everything from color preferences to personality traits to gift giving, Bosch’s famous triptych offers surreal imagery and latent psychological and alchemical meaning, and the poet uses the passing of time as a fractal lens on the various themes that emerge.

A Collision of Soul in Midair is a delight in the overabundance of signs, a fascination with structure as an enzyme of creativity. Time speeds by and the mazes constructed herein can do nothing to hold it back.