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Praise for Protection
“Michelle Lerner’s debut chapbook Protection is a breathtaking poetic journey of pregnancy and motherhood. I love Lerner’s luminous imagery that fuses at times with an unexpected searing irony. There is an originality of subject matter and candor dealing with exploring the gender identity of children that reinforces this author’s openness and intelligence. Her poem “House” may be the fiercest and most tender poem about pregnancy I’ve ever read. Michelle Lerner is a new shimmering star on our poetry planet.”
– Laura Boss, author of The Best Lover, and editor of Lips
“Protection explores the relationship between parents and their unborn child and traces it to the child’s development as a separate human being with the freedom to choose an identity. These are beautiful lyric narratives that touch the heart.”
– Maria Mazziotti Gillan, poet, American book award winner, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review
“The title poem in Michelle Lerner’s lovely and nuanced chapbook, Protection, speaks of teasing out ‘the definition from destruction/ the stumble from the fall.’ This theme of the necessary danger of experience is central in these bold poems on parenting and its discoveries. Searching from within the personal and the wider world the poems create a vivid and moving portrait of a life in our moment, written with vulnerability, insight, and a keen eye for fresh, revealing detail.”
– Jennifer Michael Hecht, Ph.D., author of Who Said (Copper Canyon)
HOUSE
I am your tin house,
your cabin, your tent
and like a tiny nomad, you travel with your yurt
on your back, wrapping around you
as you writhe like a bronco, bucking at the walls
my blood just the whisper
of wind as you stretch.
GRANDFATHERS
He never said where he was born
they just assumed it
was New York,
where he was castigated for playing ball.
the form to send his son to college asked—
Poland.
he was afraid it made him less American.
he worked 7 days a week
for more
never mentioned his own father
orphaned, walking across the border
who came here,
the reason baseball had seemed a waste of time.
The way their children became my parents,
the way we still are shoveling the dirt.
(“Grandfathers” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and first appeared in Connecticut River Review, 2021)