The House on 14th Avenue is about paired and shared lives, featuring two people whose connection sometimes seemed forced and uneven. That of master and slave. That of trembling and acceptance. Some of the poems detail each individually, a scraping together of momentary identities; others bring them together as they embark on journeys both physical and psychic. Journeys into the past through an underworld of ancestral ghosts and paths so well-trodden there is no possibility of creating new ones. Journeys in the present through detailed lists of the physical objects around them (with the mythic bleeding through on occasion leaving only stains behind). And journeys into a future where the realization of endings looms and where the two are left once more to cope, each in his or her own way, with that knowledge. In the midst of it all lurks the manipulator of words, phrases, images -- the meta-text that tries so desperately to make sense of it all, that tries to bring order into what seems like simply a chaotic movement forward, and that wishes for, prays for, sacrifices for, a dream state where a culmination of sorts exists, if only in the mind of the creator. In the end, it is left to the reader to decide whether the "two peasants" will be allowed to escape the gravitational pull that has weighed them down...to float away from the harsh realities that have defined them into the realm of words and infinite possibility.
Novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright Michael Mirolla's publications include a punk-inspired novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; two novels: Berlin (a Bressani Prize winner as well as a finalist for the Indie Book and National Best Book Awards), and The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; three short-story collections: The Formal Logic of Emotion (translated into Italian), Hothouse Loves & Other Tales and The Giulio Metaphysics III; and three collections of poetry: Light and Time, the English-Italian bilingual Interstellar Distances / Distanze Interstellari, and 2013's Bressani-Award-winner The House on 14th Avenue. A new collection of short stories, Lessons In Relationship Dyads, is scheduled for publication with Red Hen Press in the U.S. His short story "A Theory of Discontinuous Existence" was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, while another short story, "The Sand Flea," was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His poem "Blind Alley" was shortlisted for the Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem in 2007. His short fiction and poetry has been published in numerous journals in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, including several anthologies such as Event's Peace & War, Telling Differences: New English Fiction from Quebec, Tesseracts 2: Canadian Science Fiction, The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing, New Wave of Speculative Fiction Book 1, and The Best of Foliate Oak. Along with partner Connie Guzzo McParland, Michael runs Guernica Editions, a Canadian literary publishing house.
