Parking Meters into Mermaids by Merrill Oliver Douglas

Memories, “[g]one like steam from the glass,” yet recaptured in Merrill Oliver Douglas’s calm, level gaze. These quiet, uncompromising accounts are both more loving and more revealing for their refusal of sentiment. Funny, rueful, opening on unexpected depths, but above all accepting—her poems celebrate “the everyday weather of home.”

–Stephanie Strickland, author of How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected and Ringing the Changes

Merrill Oliver Douglas’ Parking Meters into Mermaids is rich with transformation: daughter to mother, body to spirit, domestic to global. “Summer, in My Early Twenties,” includes the lines, “Nights when the t-shirt stuck to my back,/and I could feel the hairs sprout on my legs,/why didn’t some grayer, fatter woman//sit me down and say, ‘Sweetie, this isn’t your life./This is weather.’” “Harvest” describes a pepper’s unlikely winter bloom as “a small fruit, gnarled//as a toothless gnome.” The poem abruptly shifts: “/We won’t eat it./It’s not food we’re after,//just this off-kilter, out-of-/proportion pleasure of seeing/kinked, bare bones give birth.” Each poem in this collection shimmers with off-kilter, out-of-proportion pleasure.

–Suzanne Cleary, author of Beauty Mark (2013) and Crude Angel (2018), both from BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City)