Midnight at the Chevron Station

Michael Malan is editor of Cloudbank (cloudbankbooks.com), a literary journal in Corvallis, Oregon. He is the winner of Meridian’s 2024 Editors’ Prize for Fiction. He is also the author of three books from Blue Light Press: Overland Park (2017, poetry and flash fiction), Tarzan’s Jungle Plane (2019, flash fiction), and Deep Territory (2021, poetry). His work has appeared in Epoch, Washington Square Review, Puerto del Sol, Lake Effect, New American Writing, and many other journals.Blake’s ambition-'To see a World in a Grain of Sand' and hold 'Eternity in an hour'-is Michael Malan’s achievement in Midnight at the Chevron Station. Malan makes his midnight hold Eternity, and his Chevron station show a whole World. This visionary collection is intimate, taking place 'here, in the land of you and me only,' but also vast, a full report on 'what I saw when I looked inside the book of stars.'                                                                    -H. L. Hix, author of Constellation In his new volume, Michael Malan’s lyrics and flash fiction perform acrobatic marvels wherein the real, magical, and surreal collide, yet they dance together in a harmonious and winning tango. These richly imaginative poems are musically alive and replete with small moments of grace and wonder, as when the poet notices 'a parachute opening like a flower in the sky,' and that '[i]t’s not easy to stand up in a stiff wind and wear your hair like heaven.' I love his touches of irreverent humor and his moments of Zen profundity that amalgamate fact and fancy, memory and longing: 'Everything you desire has its place in your / favorite mirage.'                                                -Maurya Simon, author of La Sirena: A Novella in Verse What I find most intriguing about Michael Malan’s Midnight at the Chevron Station is his use of day-to-day details that bridge to the historical, and trail from there into the deeply imagined, preserving a time and place and energy for us all. As he writes in 'The Vanishing Prairie': 'Everything / is alive, even the pepperoni pizza in the oven. Each piece leads to the visionary and the edge of the metaphysical where 'We are all drifting in the language of summer.'                                               -Christopher Buckley, author of The Far Republics