PEACOCKS ON THE STREETS, poetry by Michele Wolf

$22.50

Publication Date: September 1, 2025

Paperback, 70 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-08-6

Michele Wolf’s poetry collection Peacocks on the Streets possesses immediate mystique and grit. Life is strange, the poet alerts her reader, strange things happen. Embrace the strangeness, Wolf suggests, for “Living with wildlife is a part of life—/What we fear, what we prize.” Wolf draws a clear parallel between humans and animals; our worlds and our habitats constantly come into contact, even blur. In “Manatee Viewing Room,” the poet thinks, “Next they’ll receive Publix/Gift cards wrapped in BOGO circulars.” While the sentiment concerning these manatees is light-hearted, the inevitability of destruction due to carelessness and a sense of false-ownership is clear, and it extends human-to-human. Wolf asks, “Who is it who owns the recounting of history?/Who is it who owns a Black man’s life?” Peacocks on the Streets presents what at first feels absurd, and then through quick twists of imagery, absurdity becomes normalcy. This is our reality. In “Postcards at the Museum,” Wolf candidly describes, “The murderers had no fear of identification. Sometimes/The murderers were police. Vendors sold pop and sandwiches.” We are all spectacle, Wolf seems to say. Make the choice, come watch us.

Praise for Michele Wolf & Peacocks on the Streets

Every moment of these powerful and evocative poems is embedded with honest-to-life reflections on loss in relation to the perseverance of the human spirit. Wolf awakens in us the beauty of witnessing all the tender as well as devastating moments that serve all our lives. As Anaïs Nin noted, writers “taste life twice,” and Wolf does this phenomenally, recapturing the rich and complicated tapestries of a wild life fully lived.

—Richard Blanco, author of Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems

In a world where “wild loss is what we have,” Michele Wolf, in this gathering of polished and poignant poems, finds beauty in the most unlikely of places, including her childhood home’s crayon-eating palmetto bugs, which “burst into a psychedelic mess / Whenever I thwacked one with a shoe.” The scan of her mother’s plaque-riddled brain becomes “a garden—cornflower-blue lesions of decay.” Even in the face of a cascade of natural and man-made catastrophes, Wolf reminds us to hold on to our dreams of “run[ning] one more time in the sun.”

—Nancy Naomi Carlson, author of Piano in the Dark

Imagine a world in which animals talk—or, better—a world where we would learn their language and learn to see as they see, know as they know. Such is the premise that Michele Wolf has mused into being in her new collection, Peacocks on the Streets, with poems that range from elegy, to portraiture, to personal history. Michele Wolf is a poet of delight and mournful sensitivity; the work she has produced since her award-winning Conversations During Sleep only further underscores my fandom. Peacocks on the Streets is her best work to date, a gorgeous achievement.

—David Keplinger, author of Ice

[Michele Wolf’s] poems are candles held just high enough to escort us out of the surrounding darkness.

—E. Ethelbert Miller, author of the little book of e

About the Author

Michele Wolf is a poet, writer, editor, and teacher. Her three previous poetry collections are Immersion (Hilary Tham Capital Collection winner, The Word Works), Conversations During Sleep (Anhinga Prize for Poetry), and The Keeper of Light (Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Series winner). Her poems have been featured in The Southern Review, Poetry, The Hudson Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies, as well as on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, poets.org, and the Poetry Foundation website (Poem of the Day). Among her honors are a literary arts Independent Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, and fellowships from the Montgomery County, Maryland, Arts and Humanities Council, Yaddo, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. She teaches at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda and lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Her website is http://michelewolf.com.

Publication Date: September 1, 2025

Paperback, 70 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-08-6

Michele Wolf’s poetry collection Peacocks on the Streets possesses immediate mystique and grit. Life is strange, the poet alerts her reader, strange things happen. Embrace the strangeness, Wolf suggests, for “Living with wildlife is a part of life—/What we fear, what we prize.” Wolf draws a clear parallel between humans and animals; our worlds and our habitats constantly come into contact, even blur. In “Manatee Viewing Room,” the poet thinks, “Next they’ll receive Publix/Gift cards wrapped in BOGO circulars.” While the sentiment concerning these manatees is light-hearted, the inevitability of destruction due to carelessness and a sense of false-ownership is clear, and it extends human-to-human. Wolf asks, “Who is it who owns the recounting of history?/Who is it who owns a Black man’s life?” Peacocks on the Streets presents what at first feels absurd, and then through quick twists of imagery, absurdity becomes normalcy. This is our reality. In “Postcards at the Museum,” Wolf candidly describes, “The murderers had no fear of identification. Sometimes/The murderers were police. Vendors sold pop and sandwiches.” We are all spectacle, Wolf seems to say. Make the choice, come watch us.

Praise for Michele Wolf & Peacocks on the Streets

Every moment of these powerful and evocative poems is embedded with honest-to-life reflections on loss in relation to the perseverance of the human spirit. Wolf awakens in us the beauty of witnessing all the tender as well as devastating moments that serve all our lives. As Anaïs Nin noted, writers “taste life twice,” and Wolf does this phenomenally, recapturing the rich and complicated tapestries of a wild life fully lived.

—Richard Blanco, author of Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems

In a world where “wild loss is what we have,” Michele Wolf, in this gathering of polished and poignant poems, finds beauty in the most unlikely of places, including her childhood home’s crayon-eating palmetto bugs, which “burst into a psychedelic mess / Whenever I thwacked one with a shoe.” The scan of her mother’s plaque-riddled brain becomes “a garden—cornflower-blue lesions of decay.” Even in the face of a cascade of natural and man-made catastrophes, Wolf reminds us to hold on to our dreams of “run[ning] one more time in the sun.”

—Nancy Naomi Carlson, author of Piano in the Dark

Imagine a world in which animals talk—or, better—a world where we would learn their language and learn to see as they see, know as they know. Such is the premise that Michele Wolf has mused into being in her new collection, Peacocks on the Streets, with poems that range from elegy, to portraiture, to personal history. Michele Wolf is a poet of delight and mournful sensitivity; the work she has produced since her award-winning Conversations During Sleep only further underscores my fandom. Peacocks on the Streets is her best work to date, a gorgeous achievement.

—David Keplinger, author of Ice

[Michele Wolf’s] poems are candles held just high enough to escort us out of the surrounding darkness.

—E. Ethelbert Miller, author of the little book of e

About the Author

Michele Wolf is a poet, writer, editor, and teacher. Her three previous poetry collections are Immersion (Hilary Tham Capital Collection winner, The Word Works), Conversations During Sleep (Anhinga Prize for Poetry), and The Keeper of Light (Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Series winner). Her poems have been featured in The Southern Review, Poetry, The Hudson Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies, as well as on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, poets.org, and the Poetry Foundation website (Poem of the Day). Among her honors are a literary arts Independent Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, and fellowships from the Montgomery County, Maryland, Arts and Humanities Council, Yaddo, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. She teaches at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda and lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Her website is http://michelewolf.com.