WINNER, CHANGING LIGHT NOVEL IN VERSE PRIZE!

"Beginning in the voice of a punchline villain and ending with a philosophically rapturous finale, Michael George’s Find Your Own Way Home is a deep meditation on loneliness, the reverberations of violence, and ‘homelessness’ in an existential sense. Jumping between multiple perspectives—from a female truck driver to a wandering preacher to a police detective—George constructs a cutthroat world that bends meticulously around perception, vengeance, and the sticky tethers that bind us to the worst versions of our humanity. This tightly wound novel in verse renders a raw world that we can’t—despite our best human efforts—resist: a cyclic cosmos of darkness that spreads as predictably as our interstate highways. What’s remarkable about this brutal place, like that of our own violent world, is that it still carries the fragility of a single plate of glass, that it still carries all the vulnerability of an abandoned, pink shoe. I am astonished with what George sets out for us to do in all this muck; that we ‘might bend / the way the light bends, toward the dark / without succumbing to it.’ A brilliant and necessary read."

—Jessica Q. Stark, Author of Buffalo Girl and Poetry Editor at AGNI

“Michael George’s Find Your Own Way Home is a collision of criminality and verse. It’s a beautifully conceived distillation of desperation and reality, a lyrical ode to the essence of noir.”

—Reed Farrel Coleman, New York Times bestselling author, dubbed the noir poet laureate by The Huffington Post