Winner of the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award for Poetry

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.  

Praise 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 brig magic to the domestic life, the real magic of language that has the power to transform a world.

—John Dufresne, author of Storyville

Look carefully at the glinting lights he paints. Like everything beautiful, they will be gone before you know it.

—Lola Haskins, author of Asylum

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