Michael Hettich

Born in New York City and raised in its suburbs, Michael Hettich has lived in Colorado, Northern Florida, Vermont, Miami, and Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he now lives with his family. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami and taught for many years at Miami Dade College where he was awarded an Endowed Teaching Chair. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in many journals and anthologies, and he has published more than two dozen books of poetry across five decades. His honors include several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize, a Florida Book Award, and the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. His website is michaelhettich.com

In The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990–2022, award-winning author Michael Hettich presents selections of his previous books—more than two dozen, spanning five decades—alongside a section of new poetry written for this collection. His poetry "takes us on a constant course of discovery," and The Halo of Bees is a journey as much for the reader as it has been for Michael Hettich.  

Sample poem from To Start an Orchard

The Milky Way

If we could imagine that every word we speak
were an animal or insect, the last of a species
ever to be born, that the very act of speaking
brought extinction even before our words
had been heard and replied to, we might get a feeling
for the vanishings we witness but don’t see. And if every
conversation were understood as a kind
of holocaust denuding whole landscapes, some people
would simply fall silent—as far as they could—
while most others would keep chattering on. Just imagine
the vast forests of lives, the near-infinity of forms
brought to a halt with a simple conversation.

I would be one of the talkers, despite
the fact that I knew what my talking destroyed.
And so I would mourn every word I said,
even while I argued passionately for silence
and for learning to honor the sacred diversity
of life. Imagine watching the stars
go out on a dark night in the far north, a clear night,
one after the other until the sky went black.

Once, when I was taking out the garbage, just walking
dully across my back yard, a huge bird—
as big as a vulture but glittering and sleek—
rose from the grass and flew into my body,
knocked the breath out of me, then flew up and away
with a powerful pull of its wings. I could hardly

see it in the darkness. Then it was just gone.

~ ~ ~

Praise for
The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990-2022

To read The Halo of Bees is to take a break from the hectic clamor of modern life, to step away and consider how life can be sweet and joyous and undemanding when we slow down and take a breath, or a swim.

—Genevieve Hartman, Terrain.org

Praise for To Start an Orchard

Michael Hettich has written, with extraordinary empathy, a book about vanishment: of dreams and fathers, of love and animals and birds. Look carefully at the glinting lights he paints. Like everything beautiful, they will be gone before you know it.

—Lola Haskins, author of How Small, Confronting Morning

In these stunning, fable-like poems, humans turn into animals in transformations that seem utterly natural, if not necessary. There’s a merging with wildness, even as wildness is disappearing. The poems themselves seem almost to disappear rather than end, as if they are heading into some trees, or entering the body of a horse. Hettich, though up against implied extinctions, keeps the reader entranced in a world we thought had vanished until these poems gifted us their quiet—”until something moved around inside us again…and it hurt like language must have done once, or maybe even love.”

—Anne Marie Macari, author of Red Deer

Michael Hettich is one of our best and most necessary poets because his dreamlike stories remind us how little we truly see and how often we sleep through the day’s deep revelations. This collection—so tightly choreographed and flawlessly written—is like a long poem that shines brighter with each turn of the page. By book’s end, one is desirous to know more clearly those mysteries of the inner vision, and to bring a keener awareness to the fraught and fragile natural world that is ours to inhabit, nourish, and preserve. To Start an Orchard is a call to arms, demanding consciousness, responsibility, and love.

—Richard Jones, author of Stranger on Earth

More Paise for Michael Hettich

Hettich takes us on a constant course of discovery, often verging off the map into worlds of surprising unpredictability. The result is an engaging, compelling poetry filled with imaginative turns and intersections, and reading it we find ourselves awakened once more to the mystery, beauty, and wonder of the world around us.

—Robert Hedin, author of At the Great Door of Morning

His poems are finely observed, precisely felt, and they bring magic to the domestic life, the real magic of language that has the power to transform a world.

—John Dufresne, author of Storyville

While it is said that all poems are love poems, this is particularly true of Hettich’s work—these poems are a reaching out, striving to reach the point of connection to ourselves and others.

—Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy

Michael Hettich’s poems resemble half-remembered fables or lyrical dreams, animistic dramas played out in moonlit meadows, domestic interiors that shimmer like velvet jewelry boxes. Wisdom and enchantment are his calling cards, and he strews them about with purpose, like Hansel and Gretel marking the path home through the forest.

—Campbell McGrath, author of The Radiance Archive

Michael Hettich inhabits the interior world of consciousness, that world in which one encounters oneself beyond language.

—Steve Kowit, author of Cherish: New and Selected Poems