Michael Dumanis was born in the former Soviet Union and lived there until his parents were granted political asylum in the United States. He holds a BA from Johns Hopkins, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a PhD from the University of Houston. The author of My Soviet Union, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the co-editor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, he is the recipient of the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. He lives in Vermont, where he teaches at Bennington College and serves as editor of Bennington Review.

--Jericho Brown

"Michael Dumanis's Creature is the poetry book this year you have to read. Steeped in issues of morality, mortality, plasticity, and existence itself, Dumanis paints a picture of life that is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is terrifying. Just as Dumanis writes, 'There's more beyond / but not too much, ' the book asks us over and over again what it means to be a living thing and the answer we are given is not simple or easy to swallow. Each poem's landscape of perfectly chosen and placed language is a land to wish upon. For just as 'Everything will be taken away before it's handed back, ' Creature tells us there is hope after loss, even if it is fractured. There is hope in this book, too, as it speaks: 'I forget my life, but then I remember my life.' After all, there is poetry still to write which replaces the silence of death: 'When I grow up, I do not want to be a headstone./ When I grow up, I want to be a book.' There's no doubt that Creature contains the real poetry we have been waiting for for a very long time. Read it and feel your spirit cleansed with the truth of our present and our future--'we, who are about/ to steer our dinghy/ into the open sea.'"

--Dorothea Lasky

"In Creature, Michael Dumanis measures the divide between the inner and the outer worlds of an accomplished immigrant life. The poet's dark sense of irony provides a temporary relief from the weight of the immigrant loss but it cannot hide an unmoored heart, full of fevered self-scrutiny and longing. Creature is a gift of generosity to a divided, inconsolable human being."

--Valzhyna Mort