Announcing the Release of Garden of Rain

I am pleased to announce the release of my new poetry collection, Garden of Rain (Le Jardin de Pluie) published by Aldrich Press.

Here is what is being said about the the book:

In Garden of Rain, Mike Maggio sweeps us up in his existential quest, beginning with: I’ve forgotten who I am. In the rest of the book, he seeks to uncover his lost identity through love encounters which ultimately result in palpable longing and loss. Searching for intimacy, but skeptical of disclosure, he asks, If I showed you my secrets…/Would you swiftly seize them/drag them to your righteous court/for all to persecute and see? Nothing is fixed; the world is filled with shifting shadows. He tells us…most of the time/ I just lay back/and let life’s fine face/meander across my vision. Finally, Maggio’s finely-honed language brings him to this conclusion: …listen to your soul/let life’s mysteries fill you with song….Yes, indeed!

—Nancy Scott, author of Running Down Broken Cement

Mike Maggio’s poetry should be lingered over. His voice is both refreshing and deeply disturbing, both lyrical and stark. His is a rich world of mostly unrequited love, a world that is both magical but firmly rooted in urban reality: a woman offering a plate of brownies on a stairwell; a green bowl that s not green but black and red; a sky that becomes a dusky mirror for passing love. Social issues are infused with jasmine, peppered with an awareness of nature that surrounds us. Love itself is measured in contraceptives (“It’s in your IUD”), cooking (“It’s in your soup”) and plain boredom (“It’s in your TV”) but never taken for granted.  Maggio says it like it really is. You only need to listen.

— Joanna Chen, Poet, Journalist, Translator

Mike Maggio invites us into his haunted garden, his dreamscapes of injustice, love, loss, the everyday (magazines, TV, soup) and the eternal (the moon – a “paper cutout,” “a victim,” “an imposter”). On the one, he confesses that “The truth is/I forget I love you,” but elsewhere has the nerve to start a poem with “My love,” and go on to defeat the cliché of it. Despite the “mess of our lives we make,” he finds a way to keep going, and offers it to us: “The sun is burning a hole in my door,” he tells us, and we keep on reading.

— Marian Kaplun Shapiro, Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts

Garden of Rain is a wry voyage in which the sublime, like disaster, is always ahead and behind, in memory and expectation. It lets us know experience stalks innocence. Innocence haunts experience, leading to his conclusion: “I suppose that’s what happens / once you’ve been to the moon.” A beautiful book, filled with direct, lyrical images. I’d like to go again.

–Joe Hall, author of The Devotional Poems

Signed copies of Garden of Rain can be ordered directly from the author:



 The book is also available from Amazon.com.

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