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Wheelchair

A journey from helpless curbside struggles to the exhilarating freedom of a galloping, empowered spirit

December 1, 2021

Every curb
of every sidewalk

caused me to trip–
a turtle

flipped
in the kingdom

of the coyote–
until I learned

to lift my chair–
pop!–

onto two wheels
and hop

those curbs,
a colt freed to gallop.

📖
PART OF A COLLECTION

Requiem for Fathers Killed by COVID—for my father-in-law, Claudio Jorge Conti (1946-2020) and 4 other poems

View Full Collection →

Seth Michelson

Seth Michelson is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor of poetry. He has published seventeen books of original poetry in English and Spanish, poetry in translation, and a bilingual Spanish-English poetry anthology. He is frequently featured at poetry festivals, book fairs, and universities around the world, and his work has been translated into many languages, including Hindi, Italian, Malayalam, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Tamil, and Vietnamese. His many honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the Lenfest Foundation, as well as prizes from Split This Rock, the International Book Awards, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the American Studies Association. He teaches the poetry of the hemispheric Americas at Washington and Lee University (USA), where he founded and directs the Center for Poetic Research. As a translator he focuses on poetry from underrepresented voices in Latin America. For example, he published the first-ever single-author book of poetry by a female Mapuche poet from territorial Argentina. He likewise edited and translated the groundbreaking bilingual poetry anthology, Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention. It showcases poetry from workshops that he led in Spanish for three years inside the most restrictive maximum-security immigration detention center in the USA for undocumented, unaccompanied youth. All proceeds from its sale go to a legal defense fund for incarcerated undocumented children. He welcomes contact at [email protected].

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