In The Bone-Cracking Cold by M Bartley Seigel

Wow, reading this poetry collection really brought up a lot of issues I have with media and identity, none of which are meant to cast aspersions on this book at all, but which definitely distracted from my enjoyment of it.

So let’s table that discussion for at least the end of this review, and discuss the actual book instead. This collection of over sixty poems is mostly centered on the author’s experience living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: fitting given that he’s a former poet laureate of the area. There are a lot of poems that feel very specific to the region, a sort of inside baseball that I’m not a fan of given my belief that the best poetry makes it a point to relate, to embrace the universal or at least to paint a picture vivid enough that people who have no experience with the subject matter can still go “Ah! I see!”

But there are also a lot of poems here that succeed at making at least this reader feel what it’s like to experience life in the UP. The title piece, for example, is a gorgeous love poem nestled in the local environment: I didn’t know before looking them up what a sugarbush or a sundog are, but the rest of the poem gives it all enough context to make lyrical sense. Lake Superior is another beautiful work that masterfully draws past, present and concerns for the future into one affecting piece. Land Acknowledgment, 1842 Ceded Territory does the same, and is easily one of my favorite pieces in the book. These poems all work that delicate balance of “here are some specific things about this place that I think you should know, related to universal themes that you will already recognize, in carefully calibrated language.”

And here’s the thing, my preference for that kind of poetry isn’t a judgment as to their value for other people. If you read poetry because you like the challenge of using outside sources to decipher what references are and mean, then good for you! If you’re reading this book specifically because you long to experience the UP without having it watered down for outsiders, then you’re in for a treat.

Tbc, it’s not that I felt like I couldn’t relate to certain things either. In fact — and here’s the bit about media and identity that you can skip since it’s only tangentially related to the book — I spent about the first third of the book relating to the poetry as a bisexual woman of color… before realizing that the author probably isn’t any of those things? Which is totally fine — who doesn’t love an ally with empathy? — but leads me to my big grump: why do we so rarely announce if someone is a white, cis, straight male? Why is that almost always considered the default, as if everything else has to be marked as a deviation from the norm? I will endlessly laud Ben Aaronovitch for consistently describing people by race or ethnicity in his Rivers Of London series instead of assuming that it’s unnecessary only in the case of white people. I get that some people want to pretend that color blindness is aspirational (sigh,) but that just leads to idiotic debacles like the uproar over Rue from The Hunger Games being played by a Black actress, even tho the author herself described Rue as having “dark brown skin” in the book. Identity matters, and the amount of research I had to do on who M Bentley Seigel is in order to figure out where his meanings and my interpretations were likely congruent (and where they weren’t) made this book feel less like enjoyable reading experience and more like academic drudgery.

Because poetry, unlike fiction, unlike reporting, is so idiosyncratic to its writer that any opaqueness must necessarily be filtered through the knowledge of WHO that person is, or at least publicly claims to be. When Mr Seigel writes about love in The Mosquito Inn, is he writing in code for a shared minority experience, or is he writing from the privileged position of someone who can plausibly deny that identity, and thus escape any deleterious consequences associated solely with an accident of birth? I cannot emphasize enough how okay it is for him to write about this stuff — and I’m certainly not advocating for outing people if they’re not ready — but art hits different depending on the relative social differences between artist and viewer. Land Acknowledgment, 1842 Ceded Territory carries an entire other set of nuances when spoken in the voice of someone Indigenous as opposed to the voice of a white person. Both are valid voices, but let’s not pretend that there isn’t a huge difference in tone when you imagine who’s narrating an exhortation for the inhabitants of the area to all move forward together.

I don’t know if this book was written and presented in order to get readers to think this hard about identity. Personally, I doubt it, else it would have been marketed as such. It’s a decent collection overall. I’m not a huge fan of the patness that ended too many of the poems, but again, that’s a me thing. I just wish I’d been able to enjoy the whole book without constantly second-guessing my relationship to the poet and the meanings he was trying to convey.

In The Bone-Cracking Cold by M Bartley Seigel was published March 18 2025 by Wayne State University Press and is available from all good booksellers, including