Michel Casselman

By Michel Casselman

Purgatory Road: An Invitation to Redemption

FIRESIDE NARRATIVES OF THE SOUL

Walking the Space Between Who We Were and Who We Become

Not a confession, but a confrontation. Line by line, Michel Casselman builds a courtroom for the past, where the heart is both witness and accused. The evidence is luminous and damning: a blue guitar’s cry, a widower’s chair, a key stolen from under a mother’s pillow. This collection is the verdict—a profound, unsettling acquittal of a life lived raw, and a sentence to tell its story.

A Voice Forged in Experience

Michel Casselman is not an observer of life; he is its seasoned cartographer. His biography reads like a novel forged in salt, smoke, and deep feeling. A self-imposed exile at seventeen, he traded a quiet Canadian future for the rolling deck of a Swedish freighter, a journey to the distant Pacific that would become his raw, unscripted rite of passage. That young seaman’s awakening still echoes in the man, a resonant baseline to everything that followed…

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From the Author’s Desk

Notes on writing, memory, and the stories that shape us.

aBOUT The bOOK

Purgatory Road: An Invitation to Redemption

This collection is not a gentle recollection. It is the unflinching excavation of a life, where each poem serves as both artifact and reckoning.

Charting a course from the crow’s nests of the Pacific to the silent rooms of profound loss, this volume maps the treacherous and beautiful terrain of a man’s journey. It confronts the pillars of existence: the searing ache of a father’s absence, the complex legacy of becoming a parent, the hollowing silence of grief, and the restless search for identity across decades. These poems are the coordinates of a soul navigating its own private wilderness…

These reflections come from individuals who have walked alongside the poems. Their words speak to the personal resonance of this work.

Hearing from Readers

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – I lost my wife two years ago, and I've never found words for that hollow space. Casselman’s poems, especially 'Your Spirit in a Thousand Living Things,' didn't try to fix it. They just sat beside me in it. Finally, I felt understood. This book is a companion for the kind of loss that changes everything.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – The poem 'Birthday Wish' hit me like a gut punch. That tangled love and distance between fathers and sons—he captured it perfectly. It made me pick up the phone and call my dad, and then my own son. It’s that kind of book. It gets under your skin and changes your actions.