Michael M. Weinstein is a trans/crip poet, scholar, essayist, and photographer. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets.org, and elsewhere. A former MFA candidate and Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, he holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard and formerly served as a Fulbright scholar in Siberia. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Earlham College.

“‘Nobody else/ like us existed,’ this poet remembers midway through his shocking and delightful debut. ‘And we were everywhere.’ That's how it felt; that's how it still feels, sometimes, and it's one of many feelings that these personal, intellectual, challenging, sometimes terrifying poems ‘at the edge/ of knowledge’ (note the half-rhyme) get right. Mourning and transmasculinity, ‘language infection’ and loneliness, days in hospital and days in deserts, introspection and the sometimes desperate, muscular wish to connect, time in Siberia (literally) and a childhood of suburban American gloss: these things (as one one of Weinstein's precursors declares) are the materials, come as they will in the Yeatsian, anti-Yeatsian ‘coat of an unsharable/ disease, its too-long sleeves/ dragging over all that ground the old anthems/ called common.’ The collection he makes speaks as no one else can: full of absence and ghosts, spare with becoming, each page not so much ‘an embossed copy/ of an irrecoverable self’ as an incarnation, a way through this yearning and difficult life.”
—Stephanie Burt

“Saint Consequence is a book of 21st century transits—out of an iconic American childhood, towards the culture and language of Russia, out of one gender and into another. Such journeys, rich but estranging, require daring. Daring on the daily (the work of poetry) asks for discipline, and for this, Michael M. Weinstein shows a great capacity—from the connective pleasures of sonnet sequence to the playfulness of exquisite self-made forms to the ritual powers of repetition and rhyme. Saint Consequence asks speech to bend, to reach, to double back—not to hold, or to fix, but to move and even celebrate. Weinstein’s debut claims from our English not simply the legitimacy of self-expression, but the force (and value) of excess and extravagance. I admire this collection’s bravery, but I am in thrall to its winning sense of adventure, its grand and generous heart: ‘It’s the maybe // that keeps me.’”
—Katie Peterson