Hagar from the Old Testament, the sister of Icarus, a mad great-grandmother, and a witch are among the strange ladies you will meet in Ann E. Michael’s chapbook of poems, “Strange Ladies: Poems By Ann E. Michael” (34 pp; $10, print; 2022; Moonstone Press: www.moonstoneartscenter.org).

The poems portray different emotions with a variety of structures and styles.

“AA” has the voice of a woman saying, “I wish I were drunk/I wish night would open with a beaker of wine.”

“eBay Economics” opens with “She’s selling her jewelry to pay the rent.”

“Says the Stew Cook to Her Beloved” is more bucolic, opening with “Cat’s leaped on the kitchen counter, pawed a walnut from the bowl.”

“Some of the poems date back as far as 1982, and some are very recent from 2019,” says Michael during an interview in her office at DeSales University, where she is Assistant Director of the Writing Center.

After she rediscovered the poems from previous decades, Michael says she found that they had a theme:

“The women are a little bit unusual, outsiders, crazy women. I wondered what would make a woman crazy. I found that I could make these strange ladies into a collection.

“Most of the poems are free-form, and some are experimental.”

Some of the works in “Strange Ladies” are five or 11 lines long, while others are narratives as in short short stories.

“I wondered what would something look like from a woman’s perspective.

“‘Some Time Ago’ is about one of my grandmothers.

“‘Hagar Cast Out Into the Wilderness’ wonders what Hagar was thinking when she had to leave.

“I grew up in church. My father was a minister. As I grew up, I learned about mythology, goddesses and female figures and became interested in them.

“I write a lot about nature and the environment.”

Michael and her husband live in a rural setting in Upper Milford Township that provides much of the visual imagery in her work.

The peacefulness in some of the poems is countered by strong emotions in others.

“There are a lot of challenges to being a woman. I wanted to point out some of the resentments, and show the dark side of being human.”

“Strange Ladies” is Michael’s sixth chapbook of poems. She has also published a full-length compilation. She has a collection of poems ready for publication, and is working on another one.

“At first, I only heard poetry in church and in nursery rhymes, which I loved. I started writing in the second grade, but I didn’t think of myself as being a poet. I started writing it seriously in college.

“I liked the metaphysical poets like John Dunne and William Blake and Shakespeare, but they didn’t fit in with the contemporary things that were going on around me.

“Female poets of the 1970s and ‘80s like Margaret Atwood, who began as a poet, and Alice Walker expressed things I could relate to. I was also influenced by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.

“I write to some extent for myself, to see how I feel about things. After 40 years of writing I try not to let go of anything I discover, any interesting idea.”

Although she has written extensively on her blog, https://annemichael.blog, she finds that poetry works better for fiction writing. “I can’t seem to write a story that lasts longer than a page.

“I might be telling a story that I heard from someone else. I’ll think, ‘This is great. What can I do to make it work for me?’

“An excellent writer can make poetry more immediate and emotional. A book takes longer to get to that state.

“You can quickly provide a lyrical speculation or observation that has some meaning within a very short space.

“You can carry it with you. You can memorize it. And it can also have little pieces of information, containing outside allusions that you might have to look up.”

The cover of “Strange Ladies,” which Michael designed herself, copies the style of pre-internet publications with its black and white pictures of mysterious women.

“It looks like one of the early photocopied zines. There were funny little journals back then, tons of them. They used collages of copyright-free art.”

Michael has written that poetry can give a “connection to the cosmos:

“It can make people realize that they are connected to everyone on earth. It can make me discover people that I didn’t know, new religious ideas, words I didn’t know and had to look up, and a way for me to make connections.”

“Literary Scene” is a column about authors, books and publishing. To request coverage, email: Paul Willistein, Focus editor, pwillistein@tnonline.com