I’m Tracy Mishkin, a call center veteran with a PhD and a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Butler University.
My first full-length book of poetry, The Way The Salt Falls, will be published in April 2024 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. I’m outrageously excited to share this collection with you. The title poem is about canning tomatoes with my mother, but as you can imagine, the word “fall” has other meanings outside of salt and spoons.
falling
what you do
before you rise
you person
nation
world
The Way The Salt Falls is about failing and trying to do better on a personal and political level. The poems are written both from my perspective and from those of other people: a visual artist, a refugee, an elderly man, Jacob from the book of Genesis, a cancer survivor, a bureaucrat. They are all people: people who survived sexual assault, or voted for Donald Trump, or have been addicted to drugs, or used to be kind, or have lived without a home, or have killed for water. I like to say that the “story” of The Way The Salt Falls goes from worse to bad, but it’s more hopeful than that by the end.
My first chapbook, I Almost Didn’t Make It to McDonald’s, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014. Five Oaks Press published my second chapbook, The Night I Quit Flossing, in 2016. My third chapbook, This Is Still Life, came out in 2018 from Brain Mill Press. All of my books are available from me, Flossing is available on Amazon, and Still Life can be purchased from the press or on Amazon.
Here is a list of my publications that can be viewed online as of April 2024. It was really fun to go through and check the links. Seriously, I haven’t seen some of these poems in a while, and so many of these journals still exist! Thank you for supporting my work and poetry in general.
“Wildfire” was published in Sheila-Na-Gig online. A revised version will appear in my forthcoming book.
“Safekeeping” was published in the Brain Mill Press Voices National Poetry Month feature in April 2021 at http://bmpvoices.com/editors-choice-poems-week-1/.Scroll all the way down. A revised version will appear in my forthcoming book.
“Telling” was published in The Indianapolis Review.
“One More Bad Day” was published in Unbroken. I put this poem in a blender with a couple of others. See what happened in my forthcoming book!
“After Setbacks, We Go Sideways” was published in *82 Review.
“Crime of Passion” appeared in the Indiana Humanities National Poetry Month feature for 2017.
“Decision at the Buzzer,” “Summer Camp with Salvador Dali,” and “Cyrano at Large” were published in Jokes Review.
“Bar Mitzvah Road Trip” and “Swamp Rats” were published in On the Veranda.
“Walkabout” and “Alarum” were published in Poetry South. Scroll down and find me in the table of contents.
“November” was published in concīs. Scroll all the way down.
“The Unexpected Painting” was published in Poetry City, USA. Scroll down and find me in the table of contents.
“Bible Study” and “why I advise against plastic surgery” were published in Flying Island.
“The Thaw” was published in Clementine (Unbound). Scroll all the way down.
“Donora, Pennsylvania” was published in Panoplyzine (scroll down) and “You Got Me Wanting You” appeared in the next issue.
“Metastasis” was published in The Quotable. Scroll down and find me in the table of contents.
“Vision Problem” took third place in the Social Justice category of the Indiana Poetry Awards.
“Sorority” was published in pioneertown. I revised this poem to celebrate my sister’s toughness rather than fear it.
“Aubade” was published in A Quiet Courage.
“Arse Poetica” was published in Gutzine: A Zine about Bodily Functions. Holy crap, they made this the first poem in the issue!
“In This Economy, You Take What You Can Get” was published in Rat’s Ass Review.
“California Dreaming” and “Memoir” were published in Postcard Poems and Prose.
“Self-Portrait with Pit Bull” was published in the Indiana Humanities National Poetry Month feature for 2015.
“The Gleaners” was published in Word Soup. Scroll down.
The Devil's Workshop 
You are such a good poet. I love to read your poems. I don’t think it is because I am your mother.
A poet with an “attitude” and in-the-moment honesty. Tracy, you give a terrific reading in front of an audience or in print.
“Rolling Stops at Ethical Intersections”
Mishkin poetry I keep in my head all the time. I can’t count how many times I’ve applied this phrase to situations. My goal remains to spring it into popular consciousness…
We always heard you were good at this poetry stuff.
Tracy Mishkin draws from what is at hand, laying out poems that are contained, precisely crafted, and relentless. She examines the “rolling stop at ethical intersections” and “divorce among the blackberries.” Mishkin explores what it is to balance between calm and calamity. In one poem a couple begin an early marriage inauspiciously but succeed in crafting a life together. In another, life is splintered when a teenager learns the father he thought was dead is visiting his hometown. Lot’s wife can’t keep her eyes on life; a dying woman names a stray cat Zoe, Greek for life. This poet shows the reader pain and love—and why we should not turn away from either.
Tracy Mishkin has mined a collection of gems, her tools an incisive intelligence, a well-honed moral sense, and keen humor. Mishkin’s vision is unflinching, her craft uncompromising.
Meditating on marital to mortal concerns, God, teenagers, ovaries, and blackberries and all of their accompanying perplexity, pain, and joy, Tracy Mishkin’s tightly crafted poems in I Almost Didn’t Make it to McDonald’s pack a punch and deliver it with wit and poignancy. Mishkin’s mind is a map of the broken and the beautiful. “Hope,” she writes, “is a purple door,” suggesting that hope is rare but imminently possible and that it is up to the inhabitant of the house to choose hope, as this poet does.
Why did you never tell me about the Dali poem? It’s great!
two reviews of The Night I Quit Flossing from Amazon
Tracy Mishkin’s new poetry chapbook is a gem. Tracy is wonderful at weaving language-play with narrative to create beautiful verse. An excellent followup to her first chapbook I Almost Didn’t Make it To McDonald’s, this new chapbook utilizes vivid imagery to weave together poems of heartbreak and humor.
Love this collection of poetry! Many of the poems confront difficult topics, but Mishkin faces them in her characteristic straightforward fashion. The collection also shows how she has matured since her first book, I Almost Didn’t Make it to McDonald’s.
A comment on I Almost Didn’t Make It to McDonald’s
I love the way your wry and self-deprecatory humor comes through and the sense of seeing something deeper and more abiding behind ordinary things, ordinary situations. I like your respect for God, but the god of the title poem (“the force within me”), rather than the wish-granting ATM god that seems common in this part of the country. I love your innate respect for others coupled with your ability to see their foibles (reminds me of Sholom Aleichem).
Kiki Petrosino, series editor of the Mineral Point Poetry Series at Brain Mill Press
Read This Is Still Life for the astonishing way it braids darkness and light. Read these poems for hope in a broken time. Whatever your reasons, read these poems. And do it now.
—
Amelia Martens
Tracy Mishkin’s This Is Still Life is an anthem against apathy; this collection functions like a hand mirror—if we turn away, if we refuse to see that “This is the semi-automatic summer //…the summer of our last presidential election, of finding out how long we can hold our breath”—we will be lost.
Amelia Martens again!
Read Tracy Mishkin’s poems as an antidote to the “meat wheel full of teeth” that is the contemporary news cycle. Not because this dangerously clever collection soothes, or because it provides comfort, but because these lyrics are urgent without shallow or callous bids for the reader’s attention, and instead render the heartbreak of America as gorgeously as an old master’s Vanitas—it’s the beauty of the poems that provides hope, even as the menace of the grinning skull cannot.
This Is Still Life fully invests in the double meaning of the title as it uses the dirty minutia of domestic life to symbolically stand in for our ruin while pointing to how the sunlight gilds the dirt so sweetly, we can’t help but get up again in the morning. “Talk radio, speak / to my heart of all that I have lost,” Mishkin’s speaker prays, and we find ourselves praying, too, while the poems work polish into our hope.
from a review of This is Still Life in Tipton Poetry Journal
An exercise in exorcising the demons of the malaise that grips the world many of us find ourselves living in today … an illustration of how our endurance of hard and difficult things is itself an act of courage.