King Ezra

M. G. Stephens has written a novel about one of the most controversial figures of the Modernist movement—Ezra Pound. During the Second World War, Ezra Pound worked as a propagandist for the Italian Fascists, helping their cause with his regular broadcasts over the radio. This activity led to Pound’s being charged with treason, though he would never be put on trial for it. Instead, he was committed to a hospital in Washington, D.C. for the criminally insane for more than a decade. King Ezra takes the reader from Ezra Pound’s incarceration by the U. S. military after World War II, up to his final days in Venice in the early 1970s. M. G. Stephens draws upon his literary reserves as a poet, fiction writer, and playwright to tell this tragic story of a flawed genius.
Stephens’ prose can be quick, idiomatic or inward looking and contemplative, but it is everywhere vivid, engaging and surprising.
Michael Anania
Michael Stephens’ range is astonishing; his sentences are elegantly crafted from the heart and the imagination.
Alan Ziegler\nHere is what readers are saying about M. G. Stephens’ most recent book,
History of Theatre or the Glass of Fashion (MadHat Press, 2021)
I love the way this gorgeous meditation veers with daring and grace between poetry and prose, between art and life.
—Hilma Wolitzer
M.G. Stephens’ History of Theatre or the Glass of Fashion is the seasoned work of a pure poet and fiction writer, a marriage of the concise and lyrical, suffused with both moments of keenly observed humanity and flights of luminous rumination.
—Richard Price, author of The Wanderers and Lush Life
The whole is funny, grave and grand. Simply terrific.
—George Szirtes, author of Reel and
The Burning of the Books
A totally captivating genre-bending set of monologues, well, no, let’s say prose poems—well, let’s say—what a voice!
—Miranda Beeson, author of Catch & Release