Megan Merchant

A Slow Indwelling is a lyrically charged epistolary exchange that explores the themes of parenthood, grief, nature, and violence. In this collection, two poets refuse to flinch, engaging in conversation with the ghosts that haunt them. The book invites the reader into the kind of space created when honesty takes precedence over artifice and where vulnerability is offered without hesitation. "These poems are entombed with lilacs and bullet casings," explain the poets. "Sometimes we lose what's most important to us and fill it in with phantoms." Megan Merchant (she/her) is the owner of www.shiversong.com and holds an M. F. A. degree in International Creative Writing from UNLV. She is the author of three full-length collections with Glass Lyre Press, four chapbooks, and a children's book, These Words I Shaped for You (Penguin Random House). Her book, Before the Fevered Snow, was released in April 2020 with Stillhouse Press (NYT New & Noteworthy). She was awarded the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, the 2018 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, the Inaugural Michelle Boisseau Prize and most recently the New American Poetry Prize. She is the Editor of Pirene's Fountain. You can find her poems and artwork at meganmerchant.wix.com/poet. Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for the Jake Adam York Award, The Vassar Miller Prize, and The Levis Award; A Slow Indwelling (Harbor Editions 2024); and Distributary (Texas Review Press 2025). Quiver was recently named one of four finalists for The California Book Award. Johnson was selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the esteemed 2024 Robert Frost Residency through Dartmouth College. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.

Hortensia, in winter transports readers on a powerful journey through the lives of women bound by blood, history, and the weight of silence. Megan Merchant's titular Hortensia, an ancestor from a Mormon lineage, becomes both a ghostly presence and a focal point for poems that ache with longing, reverence, and the desire to break free from patriarchal confines. Each poem pulses with raw emotion and luminous imagery, transforming ordinary moments-radishes in a bowl, birds in flight, the silence of winter-into profound meditations on faith, memory, and inheritance. Merchant's work is steeped in the language of epistles, dialogues across time, and moments of haunting tenderness. With her deft hand, Merchant weaves a rich tapestry of personal and collective histories, inviting us to linger in the quiet spaces between loss and discovery. Hortensia, in Winter is a breathtaking exploration of what it means to seek and find oneself in the voices of those who came before.

YOU WANT A STORY OF PROGRESS, BUT IT'S FALL. In this, her fourth collection, celebrated poet Megan Merchant plumbs the contemporary American social consciousness as she explores the ageless themes of love and loss. Using the landscape of the changing seasons as her canvas, she sketches the abstract shape of marriage, motherhood, and grief. Merchant invokes the vivid decay of autumn, drawing a fierce parallel to the slow loss of her dying mother. These sparse, powerful, and distinctly wrought poems recognize that too often the most painfully palpable moments of our lives are the ones we lack the language to illuminate.

"Megan Merchant's Grief Flowers exposes with unsettling accuracy what loss would look like if we could subject it to an x-ray or place it under a microscope; its irregular divisions, its unforeseen growth, its pain emanating from ever-shifting and unpredictable locations. These poems are most alive and present in their absence, in the spaces Merchant skillfully creates between what we are grateful for, what we will never have, and what we have lost. Through language delicious and disruptive, the body and its many failings are compared to the natural world--how it protects and betrays us, nurtures us with hope and herniates our hearts at the turn of seasons, kills its leaves and splits its trees: '... the botanist said the seeds will sprout, but might / never bloom', the author discloses when trying for another child, before the title poem grieves another baby's loss while still inside its mother: "I know already, if it does not pass-- / slip into the toilet to be flushed, / they will lace my veins with a syringe /of dreams and clean house." What we know of the unspeakable nature of grief is made manifest in this collection, and laces our veins with visions of what we cannot conjure in our own lives. --Amy Strauss Friedman, author of Gathered Bones are Known to Wander and the forthcoming The Eggshell Skull Rule

A loving, lyrical ode to the bond shared between mother and child in the tradition of You Are My I Love You and On the Night You Were Born. Before you were born, you fit into the round fullness of my belly and when I dreamt I sent words like love to keep you safe. And when I first touched your tiny hand to mine, I drew a heart inside your palm for you to hold. There is no love more beautiful, more pure, than the deep-rooted love shared between parent and child. Told with vivid, poetic language, and accompanied by Basak Agaoglu's adorable, child-friendly art, Megan Merchant infuses genuine warmth and compassion in this celebration of a mother's heartfelt affection for her child. Whether it's Mother's day, Valentine's Day, graduation, or just an ordinary day, this is the perfect book to share with the people in our lives we cherish most.