The Artisan’s Bible

By Michelle Hoffmann

What happens when you stop telling imagination where it is allowed to go?

The Artisan’s Bible is an eclectic collection of poetry by Michelle Hoffmann that moves freely between the beautiful and the strange, the serious and the playful, the deeply human and the completely unexpected.

Within these pages, nature shares space with technology. Knights and dragons appear alongside cats and coffee. There are moonlit forests, distant worlds, memories of the past, questions about the future, observations about society, meditations on love and mortality, and moments of deliberate absurdity that remind us that not everything in life needs to make perfect sense.

Some poems are only a few lines long, capturing a single image or fleeting thought. Others linger, following an idea through questions of resilience, fear, empathy, freedom, balance, belonging, and what it means to remain human in a rapidly changing world.

The collection refuses to settle into one mood or one subject because creativity rarely works that way.

One page may find a lone wolf howling into the night or a traveler searching the universe for love. Another considers homelessness in a technological age, the constraints of conformity, the inevitability of death, or humanity’s desire for peace. Turn the page again and you may encounter a kitten, an ogre, a white knight, a cosmic flower, a Saturday-night roller rink, or something considerably harder to explain.

And that’s part of the point.

The Artisan’s Bible is a book about allowing the mind to wander. It celebrates curiosity without demanding that every thought arrive at a destination. Beneath its shifting imagery runs a fascination with contrast: chaos and order, darkness and hope, technology and nature, fear and courage, memory and possibility.

It is poetry for readers who enjoy wandering off the expected path.

Open the book anywhere. Read one poem or several. Find the ones that make you think, the ones that make you smile, and the ones that leave you wondering what on Earth—or somewhere considerably farther away—you just encountered.

Because imagination doesn’t always need a map.

Sometimes it simply needs permission to roam.