Michael Craig Bücher

With the same dark wit found in all of Michael Earl Craig's previous collections, Iggy Horse is a book that is unafraid to speak both into and from the uncanny valley in ways that only a former Poet Laureate of Montana can. Here, in his sixth book, Craig's poems resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar, whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the "Italy of God," or the milking rituals in Kelly Reichardt's First Cow. Not merely absurdist, Iggy Horse is a book that smartly attends to the strangeness of American life with the poetic observations of true satire.

- One of the author's sources for this book is a member of the illustrious and mysterious "Corporation" of top-10 poker players who pool their money to play for millions--revealing for the first time the secrets of their games, strategies, and partnership. - Books about gambling sell extremely well, as evidenced by the success of Bringing Down the House (Free Press, 2002), which has 320,000 hardcover and trade paperback copies in print combined, and Positively Fifth Street (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), which has sold more than 80,000 hardcover copies. - With celebrity poker tournaments boosting the Bravo cable network's ratings, and ESPN drawing over one million viewers per episode to its coverage of the World Series of Poker (held every June), public interest in the game has never been higher. Additionally, it is estimated that more than 90,000 Americans play poker on the Internet daily, with as much as 55 million dollars being wagered on any given day. - A brilliantly told, fascinating adventure story. The Professor, The Banker, And The Suicide King gives readers a view into an exclusive world--one that very few have had the opportunity to witness. - Michael Craig has written for The American Spectator, Cigar Aficionado, and Penthouse.