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Poetry. This winner of the 2011 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest will delight everyone who enjoys poetry. Written with a flair for language, a unique way of looking at the natural world, and a compassionate regard for human emotion, Michael Hettich makes the world fresh and new again by his singular and enagaging voice. "In THE MEASURED BREATHING, Michael Hettich inhabits with great panache and perfect pitch the interior landscape of consciousness, that world in which one encounters oneself beyond language. Hettich is a cartographer of that realm in which we try on other lives 'until we can dress in our own skin again and vanish from ourselves for a while.'"—Steve Kowit "Mystery, these poems tell us, continues to reside at the center of everything we think we know about existence. Splendidly baffling, imagistically engaging, and full of enjoyable surprises, THE MEASURED BREATHING explores that mystery. Hettich is an earthy fabulist here, yet the poems' ingenious transformations read as integral to survival. Yes, there is darkness, but it 'is filled with streams and underground pools' of imagination."—Susan Kelly-DeWitt