How Many Faces Do You Have?

How Many Faces Do You Have? is a poem sequence that interrogates intimacy, each poem a face the poet discovers, a reflection revealed in response to inner questioning. In a voice of quiet sonority, these lyrics journey from a high-school gym dance to a  moonlit beach polka. They linger over sushi in Montreal and an airline meal at 40,000 feet on a flight. They touch joy and pain and celebrate the vicissitudes of love that goes “into the tangled heartland / where there is no trail,” as a gift of being.  A faceis such a strange thing. Obsessedwith distortion, Modigliani loved elongated faces like Tamara’s at a distance, a flattened oval, two black jewels. Hepainted with a dagger in his teeth, they say, to see the face       within the face — grave, cold-eyed as Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt,whom I’ve always lovedfor her name alone.

"In Mike Schneider's How Many Faces Do You Have?, sensual love is a 'Mixmaster blender'--watch out if the lid is not held down tight! Here is a world where desire is 'a white bird / on naked wind, . . . never out of sight, ' hovering overhead with its 'reedy / screech . . . mixed / with sorrow.' Painterly, sometimes surreal (think Magritte or Man Ray), Schneider's imagery is both magical and more precise for being so, as in 'Song of the Old Shoes' where 'Across the moon's / penumbra, crows row upstream / in black canoes' and tall grass 'leans back / like Bacall blowing smoke.' A masterful poet, Schneider renders the many faces of love (and loss and longing) in startlingly fresh ways, and when he invites us in the book's closing lines to 'kick / our heels like we mean it & twirl / for happiness that's real, ' I gladly join the dance." --Richard Foerster

Mike Schneider's poems have appeared in many journals, including Hunger Mountain, New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review and Poetry. His chapbook Rooster was a Main Street Rag Editor’s Choice in 2004. He received the 2012 Editors Award in Poetry from The Florida Review. He lives in Pittsburgh.