I’m Sorry But None of This Is My Fault

Michael Martin Shea

July 30, 2025

“In the age of Babel where language suffers from misuse, our muse is misuse. Michael Martin Shea’s poems ‘survey dereliction.’ They offer us a stream of the quotidian, the grotesque; an echo chamber of our toxic culture, relentless as existence. Okay fine,’ he says to the horror. But still the poet chases that ‘lunar ache.

— Sara Nicholson

“In Adorno’s modernism, the ‘totality of the social’ slips into the art-object, and steadies itself there, protected from discursive reductions. But what if the ‘art-object’s’ (in this case, the poem’s) innards start talking back to its confines, without fear or remorse? I’m sorry but none of this is my fault, the title of Michael Martin Shea’s new book, could not be more apt. With a fencing foil quickness, Shea brilliantly lacerates the boundaries of ideologically vetted poetics by stretching metonymic meaning just shy of the breaking point. The surprising social-psychological entanglements that are revealed make for some of hardest won hilarity of any poetry around.”

— Rodrigo Toscano

“I’m not sure what these are. At times confession, at times accusation, at times grieving declaration informed by the moral and political ecologies of spectacle, they are also just incomprehensibly weird. And ingenious. And uplifting.”

— Gabriel Gudding

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Michael Martin Shea is a poet, translator, and scholar. He is the author of four previous chapbooks of poetry, including To Hell With Good Intentions (Beautiful Days Press, 2024). He is also the translator of Argentine poet Liliana Ponce’s Theory of the Voice and Dream (World Poetry Books, 2025). His poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Guernica, New England Review, Poetry, VOLT, and elsewhere. He earned his doctorate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.