This book’s a “poetry memoir,” and for that, I like it, though sometimes it feels like too much narrative, not enough image. Merrell writes about childhood, growing up, coming out, falling in and out of love; much of the book is about relationships, whether romantic or friendly or familial. I loved, in the first section, “Folding Sheets,” the description of how “the air underneath is undone\/like hands just after a prayer” (p 5). I love the quiet of “Waking the Family,” and the formal play of it: the first stanza’s first line is “I used to love waking first. In the house, awake,” and then the third stanza’s first line is: “I used to love waking. First in the house awake,” (p 17). The first section of “Sudden Arrangement,” with its graceful description of Easter lilies & impatience, makes me think, in a good way, of Mark Doty (or maybe that’s only because Doty’s mentioned by name earlier in the book, in “Canon,”); I like the whole of this poem, the newness it captures. “October” may be the poem I like best, the start of it especially: “Yes, I will take you as a present. It is coming on\/ autumn, and I think it would be nice to keep you\/ warm through winter […]” (p 89). “Still Life” is another poem that makes me think of Doty, or of Mary Oliver, who’s also mentioned by name, and again, it’s a solid, strong poem, water, light, birds. The last lines of the last poem are a good way to end a book: “Let us catch ourselves opening\/ and then catch ourselves stopping\/ and not. Let us open and open, \/ without knowing how” (p 136). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This book’s a “poetry memoir,” and for that, I like it, though sometimes it feels like too much narrative, not enough image. Merrell writes about childhood, growing up, coming out, falling in and out of love; much of the book is about relationships, whether romantic or friendly or familial. I loved, in the first section, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}