Her Names, Her Wits by Danika Paige Myers

“Myers stitches a portrait of family animated by her young daughter’s fascination with cemeteries—places to play with interesting names. In gorgeous lyric moments, Myers renders these plots of land as patches of earth that—like patches on clothing, like families—attempt to hold the evanescent lives of humans, an endeavor that is at once “the substance of a life” and must fail: “things that wear / away laid over things / that wear away.” A chorus of names from gravestones threads through this work, evoking in song the mystery of what it means to be a self, to be called something on earth.”

–Allison Cobb, author of Green-Wood and Plastic: an Autobiography

“As a child runs eagerly amongst headstones, so a poet is gifted songs from inside the carved names. With a sensibility reminiscent of Lorine Niedecker, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe, Danika Myers teases song from story. Reading Her Names, Her Wits allowed me to experience the powerful distance and proximity that poetry can simultaneously afford. Here, surely, is a debut to read again and again.”

–Sally Keith, author of Two of Everything and River House