Michael Broek is the author of two chapbooks – The Logic of Yoo (Beloit Poetry Journal) and The Amputation Artist (Emerge Literary Journal). His poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Connotation Press, Drunken Boat, Exit Strata, Fourteen Hills, The Great River Review, Literary Imagination, The Literary Review, and elsewhere in print and online. He has held a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Poetry Fellowship from the NJ State Arts Council. He holds a PhD from the University of Essex (England) and edits the online poetry journal Mead Magazine. \

“Michael Broek’s book Refuge/es takes on the whole world: history, justice, the fragmentations of modernity, terrorism, erotic love and estrangement. But his resources are substantial—these poems possess intelligence, erudition, gravitas and urgency. Serious and moving in voice and ambition, this passionately lyrical and articulate work reminds me very much of the capacious, fierce and intelligent work of Adrienne Rich.”
—Tony Hoagland

“Juxtaposing our wars, our disturbed cities, our flawed policies with the erotic and domestic, Michael Broek creates, in Refuge/es, a stunning love song for our troubled nation and world. Consisting primarily of three sequences, this audaciously original first book is actually one complex collage with recurrent points of reference, assembled with uncommon skill and passionate care.”
—Martha Collins

“To release man (not yet mankind) from the chains of dogma, Nietzsche prodded us to spiritualize passions, to find in human nature a force to replace our need for the divine. Since then that enterprise has never been more difficult than now as the gods return with a vengeance and as mankind, polluting, fracking, enslaving and slaughtering captains the planet to its demise. Michael Broek’s artistry in his marvelous debut shows that redeeming us and giving us purpose is the worthiest of endeavors precisely because it demands our best language and our purist lyricism. And that’s what Broek’s Refuge/es achieves: a rhapsody to the life we can still have on earth, an incantation to ward off our worst devices.”
—Khaled Mattawa