A Thousand Paper Cranes by Megan Merchant

$13.99

 

Like the best wives’ tales and folklore, Megan Merchant’s A Thousand Paper Cranes invents and follows its own strange and wonderful logic: “If two forks are resting / alongside a plate, there will be a wedding.” There is a charm in the tightly woven lyrics whose truths read as small wisdoms, lovely insights: “You remember that shadows are seamless. / You cannot be haunted by fragments.” Here each poem is a “prayer of caution” and ordinary objects are imbued with haunting new purpose, as in “How to Fold An Origami Girl” out of popsicle sticks, then teach her to “choose her own use.” The speaker of these poems hides in plain sight, “in a growing invisible / kind of way,” a wisp of narrative trailing the veneer sheets of these poems, “wrapped in wet muslin,” deceptively thin, elegant in their unfolding and refolding. Merchant’s poems evince “absence a presence,” the in-between, unspoken spaces between her imaginative images revealing an ache, the sting of loss. The micro-world created in this collection reminds me of a bee’s hive, with its energy and detail, its sharp price for sweetness.

–Jennifer Givhan, author of Landscape with Headless Mama

 

In A Thousand Paper Cranes, Megan Merchant strings poems like folded artifacts along a narrative arc that spans courtship and disillusionment, partnership and death. The complications of love, loss, and gender roles form layers “nested in the rutted/veins of this paper.” Merchant’s language is startling and precise, her offering sensual and rich in sound and image. At the heart of the book is sadness over impermanence, but these poems will remain, knowing as they do “how to fold and unfold,/to leave/a crease.”

–Lisken Van Pelt Dus, author of What We’re Made Of

 

 

Category:

Description

A Thousand Paper Cranes

by Megan Merchant

$13.99, paper

978-1-63534-209-3

2017

Megan Merchant is mostly forthcoming. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (available now through Glass Lyre Press) The Dark’s Humming (Winner of the 2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming 2017), four chapbooks and a forthcoming children’s book with Philomel Books. She lives in the tall pines of Prescott, Arizona and teaches Mindfulness & Meditation at Prescott College.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet.

Be the first to review “A Thousand Paper Cranes by Megan Merchant”

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *