In the Grip of Grace by Marianne Mersereau

Through her elegiac poetry collection, In the Grip of Grace, Marianne Mersereau pays homage to her Appalachian roots and to beloved places and people who now seem forever out of reach except through their vivid stories. The poet patchworks ancestor tales into her own visceral memoir quilt, sometimes relating memory snapshots from personal experience, sometimes bearing witnessing to family history. The effect is a warm cacophony of voices that call as the poet responds and reflects.

While the title refers to recurring themes of faith and family, it also magnifies how close bonds clutch our being in ways we don’t always consciously admit. Mersereau’s poems serve as cords tying her to a time and place where aunts might accidentally sew a snake into an uncle’s pillow, where curious children might find relief from bee stings in their father’s healing tobacco chaw, where a man might find high church in his solitude, and where a couple of religious young girls bash apart evil heavy metal records only to find themselves dancing to the same songs later in life. Ghosts, haints (both animal and human), strange lightning and mountain rituals also enchant the reader.

Some of my favorite poems in the collection are about the poet’s mother, who just happens to be named “Grace.” Mersereau pays tribute to her mother’s hair in a breathtaking poem about grief: “Her hair hangs like a long dark mystery/waist-length, the color of coal.” And in a tender memory about her father bringing in flowers from the farm field: “He kisses her and sets the jar/ on the table—a testimony/at the closing of the day.” In the Grip of Grace, we come to grasp how “the cord still feeds the rose/and pulls us home in frequent dreams.”
–Roberta Schultz, author of Underscore and Asking Price.

The touchstone for the poems in Marianne Mersereau’s superb book In the Grip of Grace can be found in her epigraph from Rilke―the “long gone are in us.”  Her words conjure memories of family and the Appalachian ”holler, gap, ridge, and hill” of her childhood, its ground fertile with restless spirits and “seeming impossibilities.” Under the spell of Mersereau’s vivid and compassionate voice, readers will be held in thrall to these poems of her rich-storied life.

–Anna Egan Smucker, author of Rowing Home, No Star Nights, and other books.

Marianne Mersereau’s In the Grip of Grace is compelling poetry, adroit storytelling, and keen memoir. Using direct, immediate language to evoke memory, Mersereau extols the past and the necessity to remember it, as the book’s epigraphs by Rilke and Trethewey establish. The pages teem with ghosts and graveyards, ponies, family members living and dead, bats, Jesus, gardens and fields, miners and teachers, churches, and more, all against a backdrop of Blue Ridge Mountains and Appalachia. When the poet turns to the cruel murder of an elephant named Mary and reveals the younger elephants’ memory of their relative 23 years later, she is also honoring the power of human love. She writes, “[the townspeople] buried [Mary] . . ./ thinking she’d be forgotten, forgetting how loud bones speak.” Indeed, the precise set of experiences these poems recall is a testament to remembering; they remind us to listen for the bones of our loved ones speaking to us from this world and the other side.

–Annette Sisson, author of Small Fish in High Branches (Glass Lyre Press, 2022).