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This is very strong, fearless stuff, beautiful.- Rhina P. Espaillat

* Nominated for the Poets' Prize 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, Author of The Dangerous World and Collected Poems 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, Poetry Editor of The Gay & Lesbian Review 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.>Mary Meriam's new collection is a treasure chest of charm and trouble. Her sonnets, lyrics and chants show the best of the New Formalism, being personal but not ever inaccessibly private, and musical without a touch of pretense. There is life and sweetness in her approach, and reproach and rue as well.- Zachary Bos, Editor of Poetry Northeast 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, Anthony Hecht Prize for Bundle o' Tinder 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, British Poet

* 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.-R. Nemo Hill, Author of When Men Bow Down and Publisher of EXOT Books