Author Description

<b>* Selected for the 2016 American Library Association Over the Rainbow List</b> <p> 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 <i>Girlie Calendar</i> 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.<br> -R. Nemo Hill, Author of <i>When Men Bow Down</i> and Publisher of EXOT Books