Outliving Michael by Steven Reigns
Outliving Michael is a memorial memoir in poetry, chronicling Steven Reigns’s profound friendship with Michael Church, who died of AIDS in 2000. Through vignettes and tender reflections, Reigns traces their intergenerational bond, a connection of mentorship, shared artistic pursuits, and the quiet acts of devotion that shaped their lives as gay men in the 1990s.
This deeply personal collection becomes both an elegy and an archive, honoring the countless roles played by a generation lost to AIDS: lover, sibling, parent, friend. Reigns preserves the texture of their companionship with unflinching honesty and lyricism, illuminating how certain people leave an indelible mark long after they are gone.
Outliving Michael is a testament to friendship’s power to sustain, transform, and survive even death itself.
Forthcoming by Moon Tide Press, September 30, 2025. Hardback, paperback, audiobook FMI: https://www.moontidepress.com/
Praise for Outliving Michael
… old griefs are a memory away, and memory, as this collection demonstrates, both wounds and consoles at once.
—Mark Doty
Reigns leads us through the life, love, and death of his dearest friend in a way that poetically and lovingly prepares us for our own final journey.
—Linda Montano
A moving elegy for a gay young/beloved/friend and a tribute to his life.
—John Rechy
For those of us who have lost people we love—a love that is powered by the lack of love we find in our families…
-—Paula Vogel
Reigns writes about the enormity of love and loss of a deep friendship…The writing here is so alive.
—Natalie Goldberg
… [a] raw volume about an inscrutable mentor and a boy without support that roars into the present.
—Spencer Reece
Reigns’s words twinkle with the generosity of his lived experience. A must read.
—Karen Finley
A disarmingly honest portrait in poems that reads like a promise between companions departed, here, and yet to arrive.
—Jeremy Atherton Lin
I cried, for Michael, for myself, for everyone I have ever loved. You will, too. I promise you.
—Dorianne Laux
Publisher Moon Tide Press
Formats & ISBN:Paperback:978-1-957799-37-7
Hardcover:978-1-957799-36-0
Audiobook: TBD
Pages 100