Just published by Nodin Press, The Song Castle, is now available on amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

What people are saying about The Song Castle:

“..as if love itself was made suddenly material,” Michael Kiesow Moore writes in one of this book’s beautiful poems. The project of these poems is to make love material and the poet does it by paying attention equally to kindness and mystery. Song Castle is a heartfelt book that feeds the heart.

—Jim Moore, author of Underground, New and Selected Poems

At the center of Michael Kiesow Moore’s Song Castle beats the wide, awakened heart of one who wishes only the best for his fellow humans. In “Two Men Holding Hands,” for instance, his final hope for the men he sees is “that nothing happens,/that tonight and every time they walk/it is as ordinary as breathing.” Though Moore finds darkness enough in these times, especially in his grief following the losses of the AIDS Crisis, his poems nonetheless call forth the necessary stories he knows will help us all “welcome the coming sun/with songs of joy.”

—James Crews, author of Telling My Father

In the title poem of Michael Kiesow Moore’s deeply moving new collection, the narrator writes, “Once we fill all these rooms, can we finally/find room enough for love?”  This book answers the question.  Yes.   With range of subjects, with sections that guide us, we are with such a human voice here:  the sorrows explored, made real, the memories both welcomed and haunting, the use of old myths to tell contemporary truths, the presence and absence of friends, and the narrator, honoring love and its power on every page. 

—Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poetry, including Willow Room, Green Door, New and Selected Poems,and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer. 

Michael Kiesow Moore’s poems inhabit — in a phrase he’s borrowed from the surrealists — a “liberated space” in which freedom serves desire.  Moore is able to confront deadly serious matters, such as the AIDS epidemic and racial bigotry, without sacrificing imagination and a honed sense of whimsy.  These poems move effortlessly between the mythological and this world in which poets “lovingly trace the path of the Word.”  A bedrock generosity underlies Moore’s varied emotional terrain.  In the graceful music of The Song Castle, there is room for us all.

—Thomas R. Smith, author of Windy Day at Kabekona