Jim Daniels is the 2025-2026 Michigan Author Award recipient. The poems in Gun/Shy deal with the emotional weight of making do. Tinged with both the regrets and wisdom of aging, Jim Daniels's poems measure the wages of love in a changing world with its vanishing currency. He explores the effects of family work―putting children to bed, leading parents to their final resting places―and what is lost and gained in those exertions. Childhood and adolescence are examined, through both looking back on his own childhood and on that of his children. While his personal death count rises, Daniels reflects on his own mortality. He finds solace in small miracles―his mother stretching the budget to feed five children with "hamburger surprise" and potato skins, his children collecting stones and crabapples as if they were gold coins. Daniels, as he always has, carries the anchor of Detroit with him, the weight both a comfort and a burden. He explores race, white privilege, and factory work. Eight Mile Road, a fraught border, pulses with division, and the echoes of music, singing through Detroit's soiled but solid heart, resonate in these poems. His first long poem in many years, "Gun/Shy," centers the book. Through the personas of several characters, Daniels dives into America's gun culture and the violent gulf between the fearful and the feared. Throughout, he seeks connection in likely and unlikely places: a river rising after spring rain and searchlights crossing the night sky. Comets and cloudy skies. Cement ponds and the Garden of Eden. Adolescence and death. Wounds physical and psychic. Disguises and more disguises. These are the myths we memorize to help us sleep at night, those that keep us awake and trembling. Daniels's accessible language, subtlety, and deftness make this collection one that belongs on every poetry reader's shelf. "Jim Daniels' newest collection of poetry, "Gun/Shy (https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/gunshy)," published by Wayne State, has Daniels at his best with his more than 50 poems covering topics as varied as his mother's "hamburger surprise" to race, privilege and factory work. Daniels' work has always been autobiographical in nature. All I can say about this collection of poetry is that it will bite you in the ass with its frankness."― CityPulse "Daniels, as he always has, carries the anchor of Detroit with him, the weight both a comfort and a burden. He explores race, white privilege, and factory work. Eight Mile Road, a fraught border, pulses with division, and the echoes of music, singing through Detroit's soiled but solid heart, resonate in these poems. His first long poem in many years, "Gun/Shy," centers the book. Through the personas of several characters, Daniels dives into America's gun culture and the violent gulf between the fearful and the feared. The titular poem "Gun/Shy" critically examines America's obsessive gun culture and its horrifying fallout. Candid, accessible, and unforgettable, Gun/Shy is highly recommended for personal and public library poetry collections."―James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review " Gun/Shy has a great deal to offer those new to the poetry of Jim Daniels as well as those who have followed his work for many years. It is both another entry in his series of reflections on class, work, and family, as well as a signal that his work is tackling new milieus and themes, most notably mortality. Another memorable poem from late in the collection, ‘Tying My Show at the New Pornographers Concert,’ places the narrator at a contemporary indie rock concert, enjoying the show while also ‘looking for someone my age.’ He writes, ‘I’m 59, going on whatever’s next.’ Readers of Gun/Shy will definitely find themselves eager to find out what’s next for Daniels and his still-engaging poetry."―William DeGenaro, Journal of Working-Class Studies "In this new collection by one of our country's best poets, Daniels brings us the news from this world and transforms it into the news from beyond this world. These are poems of time and place, written in familiar voices, suggesting narratives that could be our own, but he's infused each line, each poem, with mystery and music. These are poems that escape their form, and remake themselves in the reader's mind―in our moment and in our memory. This is poetry that inspires and terrifies. These lines are poignant, unforgettable, resonant, but somehow remain conversational, as if this poet is simply tossing off brilliance with each new observation, each sharp image. This is the strongest collection yet from one of our most important poets."―Laura Kasischke, Author of the Time Machine "Jim Daniels' poetry explores not only the realities of a blue-collar, late twentieth-century, upper Midwest childhood, but the entirety of America's sociocultural whirlwind throughout these last six decades. Few writers believe more deeply in poetry's capacity to document the world, and documentation, in his hands, is a form of homa