June 2022

These poems were written by Minnesota native Michael Kleis and are a part of his unpublished collection of poems Getting to Know which was written through the span of around ten years ranging from his college experience to post college heartbreak and lessons learned in between that time and now. Michael attended the University of Minnesota Duluth from the spring of 2012 to the summer of 2015. While attending UMD, Michael majored in English Literature and Poetry while also studying Health Education as his minor. He then studied for a spring term in Italy and returned to his hometown of Plymouth, Minnesota where he moved to Saint Paul and began his journey of writing, formatting and editing the collection of poems in Getting to know. Michael is a musician as well as a poet and performs around the state and various states in the U.S. while pursuing his passion and dreams to become a published poet. Influenced mainly by the beats, specifically Allen Ginsberg, Michael is also a fan of the writer and critic Ezra Pound, and extensively studied W.B. Yeats for a semester at UMD.