Michael Gardner lives by the water in Southern 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, BlazeVOX, and elsewhere. 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 he hopes may trigger a morphic resonance, like “enticing a string / to a luckless button.” He considers his work of the West.