“Michael Schein’s poems are ebullient, rambunctious, saucy, stoked and humming with intelligence and persuasive zeal, watchful for beauty, and in their ever-irreverent way, suffused with awe for ordinary life.  In short, they are a joy. And a romp. And a kick in the butt. And a joy.”

“Michael Schein, like his aesthetic forebear Lawrence Ferlinghetti, insists on the pleasures of song in his poems. Bold with rhyme, rhythm, and all the recursions, he offers us incantatory penetrations behind the tinsel mystique of our age, into the inner unknown where we lose our cool and shudder. But Schein has the long-sharpened wit and bone-dry humor to have us willingly join him there for the clear-liquor up-glass cocktails he serves in the dark lair of his verse. Liquid Perishable Hazardous is by no means a nihilistic refuge—more a restorative retreat from which we might emerge less burdened by our stubborn illusions. The poem, Schein knows, has purpose – ‘it has to touch the point of pain / that you might rise / and love again.’”