Witness Gathering Voices in Resistance is a poetry and photography anthology featuring the works of 16 artists from all walks of American life. Our work stands in resistance to the current political regime, and seeks to give voice to the atrocities perpetrated by the ruling regime.Our poems bear witness to these atrocities, the hate speech that fed them, and the conversion of American streets into war zones. But Americans are not ready to surrender their voices or their rights. Witness grassroots efforts in cities like Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago. We want our freedoms back. We want people to live free of fear. We want to feel proud to be Americans again. Read this book and then join us in the fight for justice."Read this book if you are feeling privileged. Read this book if you think what happens to others won't happen to you. Read this book if your mind is way beyond logic. Read it if you would rather watch rationality and chaos fight it out to the bitter end than feed a baby or watch a football game." -- Alicia Ostriker, The Holy and Broken Bliss (Alice James Books, 2024).Coming April 2026

"What we see, in this collection of poems, is an attempt to self-rebirth… to explain the unexplainable … to capture the nothingness in its fullness … to embody the concept of “hunger”, as an equivalent of nothingness … to conclude: we eat to survive falling in the nothingness. It is such a fresh metaphoric, philosophical, mixed with mystical touch. [...] In constructing his poems, Michael Bross boldly uses the raw materials of language, weaving his poem, as if he is setting a dreamcatcher web to ensnare the whole universe in one of its primitive appearances: Birth with all its subsequences."–Fadel K. Jabr, author of Athariyun (Archaeologists) and Haliman a’borun Nashid (Dreamily I Cross the Anthem)."Whether brooding or rejoicing, these poems encourage an awareness of internal conflicts by not only stimulating our sense of taste, but by questioning whether we truly know when our stomachs are empty and how much they can hold. With both tenderness and rage, this collection contemplates our darkest fears and our carnal desires with a vivid honesty about whether these Meditations on an Empty Stomach are “about me, or the lack of me.”–Lynne McEniry, author of Some Other Wet Landscape"In Meditations on an Empty Stomach Michael Lee Bross is writing from the anti-thesis of patriarchy and masculinity. He is writing from and for his humanity. Within these twenty-one poems we find the meat and the stench of life, and also the delight. The delicious taste of hunger and of gluttony. Most importantly, we find a father and a husband navigating this landscape while gifting his family unconditional love. Bross exhorts “So we must laugh, with marshmallows stuffed between our teeth / and cling foolishly to the hope we might take the bile out of being hungry…” We need more men to write this vulnerably, this tenderly, and this fearlessly."–Roberto Carlos Garcia, author of Melancolía (Cervena Barva Press) and black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric (Willow Books)

• Check out a review from Medium and Offbeat Poetry!

In his collection Vacationland, Michael Bross takes the audience on a tour that spans decades, recalling memories such as his daughter mimicking animals or his father’s physical decline. After all, seated in a “beached boat at world’s end,” what else is there to do but look back? Bross demonstrates the importance of this reflection, even when—perhaps, especially when—it hurts like hell. Having seen this book in several iterations, I’m excited to soon see it out in the world!–Michelle Greco, author of Field Guide to Fire“So let’s pretend this all happened”. Let’s pretend our father had AIDS in Disneyland. Let’s pretend our Rush mixtape is playing in the 90s while our child “needed to touch everything” in Liberty Science Center and “my autopsy’s in the sand without witness”. And maybe we don’t need to pretend. Michael Bross brings us there, let’s us into his memory and his family and his fantasies not hiding the hurt or the fear. Vacationland is a powerful work that opens up over and over seeking a way or a place to be a family the right way.–Fletch Fletcher, author of Existing ScienceMichael Bross’s Vacationland maps mourning in multiple layers: mourning a father lost to AIDS and then to death, mourning that “dying … is what we do / on vacation,” mourning how “answers murder the boundaries / of ourselves inch by inch into smaller universes,” mourning a boyhood lost to the apparent invulnerability of photographs. In some ways, Vacationland is an exploration of the lie of invulnerability and, by extension, the poison of toxic masculinity. But Bross also offers us a subtle counternarrative of hope, found in a deeply connected marriage […], that though “paradise is a race run in circles,” as he writes in the book’s opening poem, healing can be found in looking closely at the lies in our lives to find essential truths: even in snapshots, and definitely through poetry.–Darla Himeles, author of Cleave

• Chevron Up

My relationship with poetry focuses on the “Poetry as <blank>” traditions (i.e. poetry as meditation, poetry as protest, poetry as ritual, etc..). These approaches provide an ever-expanding utility to language, far beyond any simplistic sharing of information. As human experience is necessarily inseparable from poetic expression, discovery through language provides a means to explore and nurture a depth to reality otherwise lost in the often-mundane routines of our day-to-day. It allows us to self-explore, to motivate and initiate change, to manifest a greater universe made of our own potential.But perhaps the most important “Poetry as <blank>” approach to my poetic craft is “Poetry as Catalyst”. To think of any art form as having a singular interpretation deadens the natural energy of art, making that which should be dynamic into little more than a banal analog. I find poetry to be of its greatest significance when it can spark new questions and thoughts, when it can spark genuine emotional journey, and is able to convert words into vital forces beyond what either reader or poet ever intended or conceived. Poetry is an act creation through a more natural anima.For me, poetry does not happen on the page. It happens in the spaces between poet and reader, where our experiences meet, and metamorphosis become possible. It is the relationship between the question and the answer shared in our mutual struggles; in the mutual victories we achieve through the necessary reinventions we must make to navigate the world in which we exist. Yet perhaps more importantly, poetry is how we begin to make maps of ourselves, as poetry is the vital act of curiosity, and thus for myself, the closest we can come to the infinite possibilities of an unknowable universe.

• Chevron Up

Vacation Slide #1
This picture from home
always somewhere tropical
sand under the sunThe clouds are eating the sky
as waves pace God's even breathCalls of gulls echo
Tiny Ark, tempest-littered branches
driftwood painted blueNo breeze. Beached boat at world's end
We are not in this photoVacation Slide #2
Dad, the train is gone.
The rails shot straight for Eden.
Tracks, our steps in planks.No rest. No stop. Just the ride.
Dustbowl flanks in black and white.Blackbirds on the clouds,
a flock of pencil scratches
mark our migration.The radio towers buzz.
Home some distance off the tracks.(From Vacationland Finishing Line Press, 2023)

Baby Talk
This is a poem about gibberish
and it is already ruined.I want to shake a nursery rhyme
and read only the words that fall out,
those loose tooth words that can’t stand
the crowd of the mouth.Because any word small enough to fit in our mouths is small enough to choke on.And choking has more meaning than words, we get no breath,
we get silence
that we try to mash up and chew.With mouths we mangle hot noise,
the cruel device that turns sound ignorant, drains it of its truth and vibration.This is a poem about gibberish,
which is the surrender of hope
that by the end any of this
will be any clearer.(From Meditations on an Empty Stomach Finishing Line Press, 2019)