The collected works of a poet who bridges the rhythms and message of the beats, the disarming frankness of the New York School, and the fierce temerity of activist authors throughout the ages
A former jazz musician, hollywood actor, and radical organizer, the
New Jersey-born Michael Lally has worn many hats over the course of
his life. But throughout it all, he has written accessible, deeply
felt poetry. Themes of identity, love, success, and failure pervade
through his body of work, but always with wry humor and the simple
grace that is the mark of deep thought. Lally is the author of over
thirty books of poetry and prose, including White Lies (1970), It's
Not Nostalgia (1999) and Swing Theory (2015). Lally is the
recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence
in Literature and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts,
among others. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.
Eileen Myles is a groundbreaking novelist, poet, and performance
artist, whose books include I Must Be Living Twice- New and
Selected Poems and Chelsea Girls.
"Michael Lally’s risky, talky, autobiographic, ethnic, disarming,
poignant, desperate, consoling, elegiac, wily, vernacular lyrics
have been charming and challenging the poetry world for half a
century. 'What we know is the way we fall': From South Orange to
SoHo to Hollywood & back to Jersey, from youthful exuberance to
geriatric trauma, Lally’s salt of the earth work is spiked by
caraway, cayenne, thyme, & sage — with a twist." —Charles
Bernstein, author of Recalculating and Pitch of
Poetry
"Michael Lally chisels his poems the way Maya Lin makes a memorial
or Leonard Cohen a song. This precision reveals pathways to all we
were afraid to say, to the truth. His deep forays into liberation
mark him as one of the most essential poets of our era. He worries
over difference until he can show that it's all about love, which
never dies. His poems are bookmarks in my life." —Mindy
Thompson Fullilove, MD, author of Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy
in American's Sorted-Out Cities
"Michael Lally tells all of the secrets. Yours, mine, his,
everyone’s. Everything you ever hoped that people wouldn’t know
about the real you, all of the thoughts that have nested in your
head your whole life, he’s got down on paper. He spares no one.
When he writes, 'I REFUSE TO LET WHAT I’VE ALWAYS WANTED KEEP ME
FROM HAVING WHAT I’VE ALWAYS WANTED' Lally guides to honesty. His
writing is like a cleanse for the spirit, things coming loose
inside you, while telling you, 'It’s alright...it’s alright.'"
—Alec Baldwin, actor
"Michael Lally is our faithful antidote to the politics of
forgetting. When his wondrous chapbook My Life appeared
on the scene in 1975, it woke a whole city of young poets to its
standard of impassioned, activist aspiration. The standard would be
justified in the life. Through all the regressive decades that
followed, whether in New York, Los Angeles, or communities between,
Lally continued to fashion a poetry of engaged and egalitarian
civic ecstasy, which makes his work as indispensable now as it is
irresistible. He is a great poet, not of his generation only, but
of those fervent democratic vistas he restores to
view." —Douglas Crase
“Charisma, the title of one of Michael Lally’s early publications,
is the perfect noun for this gregarious, theatrical, indefatigable,
funny and sometimes pugnacious master of the American idiom. Such
amazing works as “It’s Not Nostalgia – It’s Always There,” “Before
You Were Born,” and “The Village Sonnets” provide all the evidence
you need to link Lally with Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan, 'two
Irish-American / poets like me, haunted by Catholic guilt / and
dreams of sainthood and sex – or / sexhood and saint.'” —David
Lehman, author of Poems in the Manner of...
"A life's work in poetry is an achievement and a manifesto. Another
Way to Play is Michael Lally's manifesto in powerful poems that
allude to rebels, revolutionaries and the occasional miscreant
whose achievements served as model for Lally's adventures in peace
making, music loving, erotic affairs and marriages, politics,
fatherhood, brotherhood, "the hood" as defined by a working class
New Jersey Irish American upbringing. Lally's youthful beat rarely
prepares the reader for his erudition, his reflection on this
culture and his deep understanding of performance (he's also an
accomplished actor) so it is good to see those sophisticated works
made center stage. This is a huge book filled with poems that
insist, digress, chastise and provocate. Another Way to Play's
manifesto is a "life in poetry" and we are better for it."
—Patricia Spears Jones, author of A Lucent Fire: New and
Selected Poems
"Michael Lally. When I was a young poet I said, 'He's our Walt
Whitman,' the way he was huge, containing multitudes. Working class
guy, movie star, father, gay and straight, lover not a fighter. But
it's the poems I mean. And this is his Leaves of Grass, a
life's work with life to go of course. Life To Go, not a bad
title, thanks, Lally. He inspires like that, immediacy. He's always
telling the poems directly to you, only to you. You can always go
back to them. But you can't. They change. 'Go ahead,' try them, the
way they hold you. That's what I mean. It's all here in the poems,
and they are all for you, because Michael Lally has your back and
he will never let you down." —Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery
Poetry Club, author of Sing This One Back to Me and The United
States of Poetry
"Michael Lally is difficult to categorize as a poet. He does not
fit neatly into any of the schools. But, after all is said and
done, his work is revealed to be uniquely memorable and exciting.
Part of the thrill Lally’s poetry gives is seeming to be a person
naturally talking, jiving, communicating. Of course, it’s never
that easy, and Lally has never taken the easy way out, continually
confronting himself as well as the terrible truths of his times.
This collection will confirm what many have long known: that
Michael Lally is one of our essential voices. 'Love is always the
ultimate resistance…' For these times, forever. Thank you, Michael,
for showing the courage." —Vincent Katz, poet and author
"These poems bear witness to the laughter, love, fear, certainties,
celebrations and ever-growing artistry of an extraordinary man over
the course of decades as he moves through the wonders and
disappointments of this world. The poems of Michael Lally are
sometimes humorous, sometimes confrontational and provocative,
always honest, well-crafted and filled with emotion so raw and pure
you can’t help but be moved with him to tears, to rage and
defiance, to fear, vulnerability or resignation because sooner than
later you’ll start to recognize your own fragile heart hidden
somewhere in a stanza. What an amazing, revealing collection!"
—Nana-Ama Danquah, author of the acclaimed memoir Willow Weep
for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression
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