Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Girlie Calendar

Girlie Calendar

Meriam, Mary

Paperback

Series: Lillian Trilogy, Book 3

General Poetry

ISBN10: 0692216723
ISBN13: 9780692216729
Publisher: Headmistress Press
Published: Jul 18 2014
Pages: 110
Weight: 0.32
Height: 0.28 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
* Selected for the 2016 American Library Association Over the Rainbow List

Song is mysterious. It seems to arise when the separation between sophistication and simplicity has been submerged in deep water. Song is that ringing-out of the wrung heart whereby what is personal becomes what is universal-and so it is fitting that all the archetypal seasons in Mary Meriam's Girlie Calendar have their own specific songs to share, their own ardent delights. Yet these delights are hard-fought, because song is also that inspiring moment of transcendence so in evidence in the courage of these lines: A knife of pain may bend you over double, / but hover, swing from your trapeze, breathe. Mary Meriam's songs are thus both breath-taking and breath-giving. Indeed, there is a rigor of architecture in these poems, as well as in the construction of the book as a whole, that is exacting, deliberate, astonishingly disciplined-and yet surrendering to such songs, as a reader, seems as natural as breathing. Let steel become a sigh, she sings to herself in her month of August. Those five words rise and fall as an exquisitely fragile monument to all song. I would even go so far as to say that they are a powerful medicine for what ails us.

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