* Conjuring My Leafy Muse (Book 2) nominated for 2015 Poets' Prize * Girlie Calendar (Book 3) selected for 2016 ALA Over the Rainbow List “A poet can survive anything but a misprint,” wrote Oscar Wilde, flippantly intimating that poets are made half-mad by a world of trouble. One rootless poet lost in trouble, Mary Meriam, found an anchor in The Lillian Trilogy, which combines in one volume her three recently published poetry collections: Word Hot, Conjuring My Leafy Muse, and Girlie Calendar. The poems use a wide variety of poetic forms to capture and command relentless buckets of loss and heartache, revealing the untold horrors of her life and turning them around in a magnificent blossoming of longing, lust, sadness, and wit. This is very strong, fearless stuff, beautiful. —Rhina P. Espaillat Mary Meriam is a rare and original poet. This is a dazzling book, a fusion of anguish and wit and song, written in clear and compelling language. I love the wildness, the inventiveness, the always surprising but accurate metaphors. She writes of real things, real people, always musically. She uses Mother Goose rhythms and rhymes or echoes of Sapphic meters or settings as grim as any of the Grimm Brothers’ tales, to tell searing truths that move, frighten, and delight one with the skill of their telling. —Naomi Replansky Mary Meriam is a frightening poet, a frighteningly good poet. The intensity of her writing will frighten you, but also her technical skill. She can put a chill into the most common rhyme. The poems speak like “a gust of gorgeous / thundering swallows.” She identifies her models as Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew, whose Goblin Market and “Farmer’s Bride” rightfully haunt the collection. But her real soulmate is Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the ultimate poet of the queer and scary whose masterpiece, Death’s Jest Book, was left appropriately unfinished. She may ask us to “unspook” her dreams, but we won’t succeed. The uncanny is too engrained in her sensibility. All we can ask is that she continue to keep writing. —David Bergman Mary Meriam is a poet who takes risks, by which I don’t mean what you think I mean. There’s nothing risky about breaking rules that haven’t been in effect since 1880. I’m talking about the modern rules, the new respectability, the advice given in poetry workshops by legions of successful poets whom no one reads. Mary doesn’t give a shit about Pound’s “don’ts,” she’s too busy writing fierce, gorgeous poems about love and pain. She’s a true rebel, in all her heartfelt, singsong, vulnerable, girly glory. —Rose Kelleher Mary Meriam is an accomplished technician and imaginative Mother Goose artist, who like Mother Goose (my favorite collection in the world), is almost always serious, even tragic, along with fun. I am floored by poems with lines like the opening of “I Learn Today My Mother Lied”: “Not one drop of Jewish blood / in me or you!” my mother cried, / as if she had a drop to hide... We are lucky to have her dissident voice. —Willis Barnstone Mary Meriam’s formalist poems are compressed bliss, dreamlike couplets and velvet quatrains honed to a fabric delightfully carnal. Like two of her touchstones, Frost and Bishop, her masterful metrics are handmaidens to her message at play in the fields of passion, loss, and redemption. —J. Patrick Lewis This is my kind of a poet. ‘She speaks,’ as Larkin said of the beautiful and wistful and utterly different Stevie Smith, ‘with the authority of sadness.’ She also speaks in the language of tradition. She uses old forms fiercely. She is rather a fierce poet. Oh, and a Lesbian. You can’t ignore that. But what does she do? Do with words. Magic. Above all, Mary Meriam is a magic poet and if that is what you want (as I do) this is a book for you. —John Whitworth

The Lillian Trilogy

Literature & Fiction

Meriam, Mary

Poetry

Headmistress Press

In ambitious and dextrous poems employing a variety of formal guises, Mary Meriam creates for us an impressionistic yet incisive vision of love and loss in her powerful new collection, My Girl’s Green Jacket. Recalling the sonnets of John Donne and the religious ballads of Christina Rossetti, Meriam’s assured poems pulse with a channeled intensity, leading us as readers through an emotional and intellectual landscape . . . A collection as brilliant as it is emotionally nuanced, My Girl’s Green Jacket offers us a complex imaginative mirror to hold up against our current reality. —Stu Watson editor of Prelude Lush, acrobatic, heartbroken, and witty by turns, or all at once, Mary Meriam’s poems pack plot, memory, landscape, and longing into firm and elegant shapes. To call this work formally accomplished isn’t sufficient. Meriam’s lyricism is nervous and incandescent; her poems coruscate and spin. My Girl’s Green Jacket honors not only the urgency of desire but also its mercurial restlessness. Poetic forebears ranging from Sappho to Hopkins, from H.D. to Marilyn Hacker, turn out to be not only generative models but also anchors in a world of relentless change. —Rachel Hadas author of Poems for Camilla The poems in this extraordinary collection shimmer with light and color, vibrate in the imagination with almost hallucinatory effect. They reach the reader, through the intimate short-cuts of the senses, so powerfully that the gorgeous, daring language feels inevitable—just right—even as it leaves objective order behind . . . Poem after poem in a rich variety of expertly handled forms—“The Mockers,” “Ars Poetica,” “Dusk,” for instance—reveals the nature of love: its capacity to sow guilt, regret, longing, obsessive memory, fantasy; its tendency to inhabit every thought, experience, and sensation, and not only with our permission, but at our insistence. —Rhina P. Espaillat author of And After All and Agua de dos ríos/ Water from Two Rivers Mary Meriam’s My Girl’s Green Jacket is rich in description, rhymes and rhythms, bedecked in vivid color and emotions undimmed by the veneer of irony that shellacs so many contemporary poems. Like the moon she describes in “It Gets Very Dark until the Moon Rises,” Meriam’s songs, stories, prayers, fairy tales, ghazals and love-cries shine, grow, and give the dark a dream. —Joy Ladin author of Fireworks in the Graveyard This stunning collection of verse by Mary Meriam presents a palette of poems in various hues and forms . . . a spectrum of color reflects this poet’s sense of loss and longing through a synesthesia that helps us hear, taste, and feel pigmentation as thought and emotion . . . Meriam notices the world quietly, yet vibrantly, alive to its potency, and we savor it too, dazzled by the poet’s keen, discerning eye. —Janice Gould author of The Force of Gratitude Awe is equal parts nightmare and pleasure. Awe, in the hands of a poet, is exquisitely and horrifyingly impassioned. Mary Meriam’s My Girl’s Green Jacket writes the labor of our awe. Meriam stealthily interrogates our humanity by way of near-perfect poetic form . . . Meriam writes: “Nothing normal has ever happened to me.” I say: Thank God. —kathryn l. pringle author of obscenity for the advancement of poetry

My Girl's Green Jacket

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Meriam, Mary. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Meriam, Mary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Meriam, Mary. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Lillian Trilogy

My Girl's Green Jacket