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At the raw base of our limbs, just as green sprouts and thin tentacles tap into new soil, Michelle Doege's poems get deep into our "marrow." The poems in Root of Light time travel among the living and the dead, between the ancestral and family homes of Germany, the US, her wife's native India, and their new home of Canada. These vivid and visceral poems embody how forced migrations and border crossings, whether driven by famine or persecution or love, can leave the migrant feeling severed from the family tree. And yet, these illusive and permeable borders are never as solid as they seem. Doege's poems sprout trees from the clearcut in unexpected crevices infused with the green and radiant light of Hildegard von Bingen or the sturdiness of the poet's father, her "one solid oak," who taught her to build beauty from the heart of the wood.
About the author
Michelle Doege is a writer of poems and stories, an educator, and a nurturer of any creative community she calls home. She holds an MFA in creative writing in poetry and mixed genre from Augsburg College, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her poems-both print and video-have appeared in Why We Write: Poets of Vernon, Smoke & Ash, Possessions: The Eldon House Poems, Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems, Farm Folk City Folk; her story "End of a Rainbow" appears in Wherever I Find Myself: Stories of Canadian Immigrant Women (Caitlin Press, 2017). Her recent writing has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review's Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Award (2021) and earned semi-finalist in the Tulip Tree Publishing Contest (2019). Doege also finds great joy in layering poems with visual art, in broadsides or video collaborations. She currently writes and offers writing workshops in the Okanagan, British Columbia, her home, the green and freshest tendrils of her roots. To learn more about Doege's writing, creative activities, and workshops, please visit: www.michelledoegepoet.com.
