A Thousand Paper Cranes by Megan Merchant

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