Michael Gardner lives in Santa Barbara, California. He is the author of three chapbooks, Comfort Dog (Clones Go Home), Opening Out (Lumino), and Acoustic Shadows (la spiaggia). His work has appeared in Tyger Quarterly, Action Spectacle, and BlazeVOX. He was the publisher of the coffee house poetry zine, The Independent, that was hand-delivered with comrades around to LA’s outposts.

In this post-everything world, an unending stream of micro-glimpses can orient our experience, availing a reality of surface. Gardner’s poems are inspired by the poetic lineages of deep image and lyric. His poems offer improbable correspondences that trigger a morphic resonance, like “enticing a string / to a luckless button.” Gardner considers his work of the West.