Stay There, new book by Michael Klam, reviews, links… Get your copy now!

I finally made another book. It only took a few hundred years. Here are two reviews by CA Poet Laureate Lee Herrick and award-winning poet Jane Muschenetz; and you’ll find more reviews below. Please read and find the authors who’ve supported Stay There with a quote or two. I loved making this book and I hope you’ll buy it and love it too!

Stay There is the book your phone-addicted, passport-clutching, food-obsessed inner voice wants to slip into everyone’s DMs. Part travel journal, fever dream, love letter to family and mixed heritage, it says the quiet parts out loud — then keeps going. Klam’s musings romp through a life of a retired teacher and dad who’s seen enough to be cynical and feels too much to stay there. Self-deprecating, non sequitur, and more comforting than a travel pillow, poems like “Gravity Draws Me Like One of Its French Girls” tenderly serve up social commentary with signature wit. Read this if you’d like to “remember how to be in love with the world again.”

—Jane Muschenetz, author of All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents

Part Japan and Taiwan poetic-travelogue, part musings and drawings, Stay There is a thoroughly enjoyable book. Michael Klam’s poems exude a playful levity and keen observations on humanity. They have an open-hearted spirit of wonder and surprise, from the importance of knowing how to draw Ponyo, to the “quotient of sorrow,” to “a diamond in a drop of anti-freeze” — an entertaining, delightful read.

—Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, author of In Praise of Late Wonder

More reviews below. Buy in paperback or Kindle HERE and/or tap the cover:

You can also purchase the book through my Venmo if you’d like a signed copy. Send $22 with your name and address.

More reviews:

Stay There overflows with Michael Klam’s signature wit as the poems move through travel observations, familial love, political reflections, memories, confessions, and more. The Table of Contents had me laughing aloud before I even got to the poems! Klam skillfully balances good humor and absurdity with moments of wonder, beauty, and profound contemplation. Reading this book feels like having the best kind of late-night conversation at a pub with a longtime friend. I love it!

—Dr. Katie Manning, editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review

Stay There is for anyone who likes their marbles chipped and wayward. This collection is full of surprises, humor, bumps and edges. There are Hot Pot Haikus with full ear chunk corn and skeleton pirate dance parties interspersed with classroom dialogues, practical advice (“Be ready with spoon”), and a visit to a muddy mountain shrine. The illustrations and verse feel organic and unvarnished – like truth spilling out before you can stop yourself.   

One of the strengths of Stay There is the cohesion between text and visuals. The drawings are as evocative and as rich as the poetry. Both are simultaneously weighty and whimsical. I came away feeling inspired to live boldly – a disposition perhaps best summed up by one word, which is my favorite poem in the book – GUSH!

—Ying Wu, Ph.D., poet, cognitive neuroscientist, UCSD

Whimsical and piercingly honest, Klam’s Stay There journeys through the many meanings of departure and dreams. Moving between sleek trains and smiling bones, these poems ask what it means to leave, to arrive, and to live with joy. Playful sketches and intimate reflections on parenthood bring warmth and unexpected charm to the collection.

—Daniela Paraguya Sow, author of Half Moon Rising, Kelsay Books, 2024

In these pages, the consonance of voices and visual art leads us to a dazzling, trance-like state where beauty, imagination and daily life converge. Here, the reader will encounter poems as mantras to be nested in mind, heart and soul.

—Olga Gutiérrez Galindo, mathematician, physicist, author of En el nombre de π, Ediciones del Lirio y Los Pájaros

Michael Klam’s newest collection is cause for delight. Tender love poems, poems of adoration of a father for his children, and the surprise appearance of taco haikus (yes, taco haiku or ta-kus) and so much more all mixed in with illustrations that are fun and sometimes downright silly. I read Stay There with a smile on my face, an occasional out loud chuckle, and admiration for this gifted poet and sketch artist. This collection is exactly what the world needs right now.

—Judy Reeves, author of A Writer’s Book of Days

In Stay There, Michael Klam invites readers into a richly layered world of whimsical sketches and luminous verse. His poems move effortlessly between wit and gravity—at times playful and clever, at others contemplative and piercingly profound. Exploring themes of love, family, travel, and life’s quiet revelations, this collection captures the magic found in both the ordinary and the extraordinary. An intoxicating and artfully crafted book that lingers long after the final page.

—Jill G. Hall, author of On a Sundown Sea

I am utterly disarmed by these poems. In his unmistakable voice, Michael Klam delivers a book of poems that are humorous, deep, and tender by turns. Did I mention these poems are funny? But that’s not all they are. From traveling abroad in Taiwan to eating tacos and hot pot, this book is a feast for the senses. It’s also a book with a clear-eyed, abiding love for family. In self-aware family portraits like “The Art-scientific Mandarin Formula of Us,” we watch as the Mandarin words for honey, wind and rain, and love—feng mi, fēngyǔ, and ai—are wedded to create the equation for a multi-lingual family. But, just when you think you have this book’s visual art and poetry pegged, here comes a mer-cow joke or a memorable image of the Quaker Oats guy with SICKO sharpied on his forehead. So, don’t blink. Read. These poems will make you laugh and then move you with their heart-earned wisdom. In his new collection, Stay There, poet Michael Klam reminds us that humor slips the serious past our defenses, and we swallow it whole without even noticing. 

—Carly Marie DeMento, poet, host, literary arts and environmental advocate

Reading this new collection, it feels like I’ve been visiting with an old friend — but on another part of the globe: East Asia! Fans, old and new, of Michael’s work will be reassured to know that his legacy of both informing and entertaining his readers is as laser-focused as ever. Primarily a book of straight-to-the-heart observations, both as foreign traveler as well as local surf-poet guy, these poems let us into the psyche of an oft world-weary man, whose wife and children restore and make whole his humanity. “I would like to remember / how to be in love with the world again” and I know instinctively that he speaks for all of us looking for more than just a little hope in the poetry we consume.

—Robt O’Sullivan, Escondido Arts Partnership

“Stay There” is an eclectic mix of poetry interspersed with whimsical drawings that take us on a journey to Japan and Taiwan, to distant memories of deceased grandparents who seem so familiar, and to places where natural beauty reigns supreme. Michael Klam throws out the rules and throws down a collection that had me laughing one moment and caught in quiet contemplation in others. My favorite pieces revolved around his love for his family.  He doesn’t just write a love poem for his partner and child; they become the poetry.  

—Alisha Richard, trans activist, poet, performer

Reading STAY THERE, Japan and Taiwan Poems, Visual Art and More by Michael Klam, is like having a deep and amusing conversation with a child. This is, of course, a compliment. And a big one! What a gift to be so silly and lucid, so playful and dead serious at once. The sketches of cartoonish animals are a great companion to the poems, adding humor, tenderness, and familiarity. I would say this is a book about journeying and journaling, about living and remembering, about engaging with a world that can speak to us in the form of a deity living in a mountain, a pigeon defecating on your porch, or a horse staring at you. It’s also a book about growing old gracefully, meaning without totally adulting, when adulting means to stop marveling at a world so full of beauty that it makes your head and your heart hurt because… beauty does all sorts of stuff.

The poet turns 54, but sometimes he claims to be 65 to get the senior discount. And this is cool but also very alarming, to not stop him from aging even if it’s a joke or a lie! The poet is thinking about retirement, he is getting ready for a few sayonaras, but also to fall in love with the world again. Indeed, there is so much love, so much hope and gratitude in these poems, that are, nonetheless, cognizant of the horrors taking place in our backyard. Silly poems that turn political while the political turns silly, but also scary and sad. But hope is so stubborn, and everywhere we turn in this book, there is something like a beginning, like the chance to feel “a little less hatred in [our] hearts.”

—Margarita Pintado Burgos, PLNU professor and author of Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat

Stay There is a love letter to family.

—Ted Washington, artist, editor, author of Bone Lyre, Puna Press.

Featured image is Michael Klam wearing Tina and working on mural in North Park, San Diego.