What We Do is available now on Amazon or at your local bookstore
Finalist, Washington Book Award.
Praise for What We Do:
"In this deeply felt first collection, Michele Bombardier considers faith, illness, death, and above all, human connection. With humor and compassion she shows us her own family, but also patients, students, strangers. What We Do is a call to empathy, an invitation to listen for what lies underneath. The people inhabiting these poems come to life through such rich, loving detail they all sound like family."
— Ellen Bass
Michele's book What We Do has been praised by poets and non-poets alike.
This collection centers on resiliency and connection, forgiveness and memory.
“At its center, What We Do is about survival, how quickly things can fall apart, and what it means to live in the aftermath of loss. Resilient and brave, the sonnet cycle in this collection does what poetry is meant to do, shake us into awareness of ourselves, and of those around us, whether family or stranger, the rhythms and forms working against grief and pain.”
—Dorianne Laux
“These are poems of a fully inhabited life, portrait poems, family poems, poems of joy, sorrow and healing. I admire their attention to detail and their clear honest language.”
—Joseph Millar
“Michele Bombardier’s debut poetry collection, What We Do negotiates the landscape between the critical questions of love, loss, and survival, and those revelatory answers found in the dimly lit situations on that road. The work is powerful, has beauty, music, and a tender honesty. There is trust in the details, nothing hidden, everything earned. This is a book of contemplations on what it means to walk in front of a world of risk, where even the smallest parts reveal so much on what keeps us going forward. In poem after poem here, there are bodies and souls, no judgement and plenty of truth.”
—Gary Copeland Lilley
“Michele Bombardier’s debut poetry collection What We Do is a balm in this fractious moment. Even as the world seems to be splintering into factions, Bombardier’s poems celebrate moments of connection: between parents and children, between doctors and patients, between the living and the dead, between the speaker and her sometimes haunted past.”
— Jennifer Saunders
Whale Road Review
“Empathy can take many unexpected forms in Michele Bombardier’s collection What We Do. These poems shine with an intelligence that connects with others wo might be easily dismissed and the heart to respect and honor that connection…Many of these poems gave me chills or had me bursting into tears. I needed this empathy. Perhaps you do, too.”
— Deborah Bacharach
The Rupture Magazine
“Bombardier’s poems offer literary and emotional encouragement and nourishment, a solace while we wait for our ‘cup to be noticed and filled.’”
— Mary Ellen Talley
Sugar House Review
“The themes of Bombardier’s collection blend well with those of her life in the medical field. As a neurological and developmental language specialist who works with patients managing stroke, autism and brain injury, she channels- in her writing and in her real life- the skill most needed for effective healing: human connection.”