Michael S. Judge was born in 1987 in Kansas City, MO. He grew up in an Irish Catholic enclave in Kansas City, MO and was taught and terrified by Jesuits, much as per Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. He spent his adolescence in a basement making records, some of which still exist, and then went to Texas to study music. Blake, Eliot, Joyce, and Pynchon made him want to write; Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes and Iain Sinclair showed him that it was possible. He was very briefly employed by Purdue University, after which he says he spent about a year “in disintegration.” He’s been in Texas since 2011 writing.
Judge has written several novels as well as translating Charles Baudelaire and Dante, among others. Skylight Press will soon publish …And Egypt is the River, which will be followed by The Scenarists of Europe (due out from Dalkey Archive in 2014). His version of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal will be published by Fugue State sometime in the next year or so, and he’s just finished a new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he says “will probably be published in 2099 by a group of blind animals who’ll print it on the side of a plastic replica mountain in Utah.”
Not confined to pen and ink Judge is also a multi-instrumentalist and generator of various interesting indie music projects, including The Wolf Tickets, Jerusalem, Sinthome and most recently, The Nerve Institute. In a 2012 review on prog-sphere the latter was described as “a project that makes surreal and dense, yet quaint, charming music.” Similar praise could be made of his imaginative and unique poetry and Skylight Press is thrilled to introduce it to the world.
Through the Skylight 