On the Mercy Me Planet

Maya Janson

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In these elegant, sparkling poems, Maya Janson writes about life's contradictory, mercurial nature with wit and warmth. Her imagination is expansive, her images surprising and delightful. Beware the urge to haul everything you own/ to the top of a mountain in order to hurl it, she writes in 'Pushing the Dead Chevy.' The poems in On the Mercy Me Planet, personal and intimate, ponder the duality in daily life, that it is both traumatic and triumphant, that we understand and yet know nothing. In mythology the pomegranate/is said to signify the underworld. In real life, / a simple granite headstone will do. Despite death, loss, injury and breakups, diagnoses and climate change, in Janson's poems the sea still laps against the shore, the rower still goes in, out, and back in again. Find the way then lose the way. Repeat.

Book Details

Publisher: Blue Edge Books
Publish Date: May 1st, 2022
Pages: 68
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.80in - 5.80in - 0.30in - 0.26lb
EAN: 9798985435702
Categories: • American - General

About the Author

Janson, Maya: -

Maya Janson's first book, Murmur & Crush, was published by Hedgerow Books. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies and she has received fellowships from MacDowell and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she has worked as a lecturer in creative writing at Smith College and as a community mental health nurse.

Praise for this book

Prepare for detours. The minute you think you know what Maya Janson is doing in her poems, she does something new. She'll take you to an icebound river, a seashore, a roadside saloon. Along the way a tiny doorway will open in the middle of a line and let in a whole extra world you never saw coming, 'through the thicket, through the pasture, beautiful / but full of ticks.' A shapeshifter's trick. As you stand there, dumbfounded and marveling, she'll emerge from amid the bears and bees and bearded iris, ready to pounce on you with exactly the right move, beckoning like 'a restlessness moving from depth to surface, jumping / the way we do from hunch to thought, from certainty / to a less sure thing.' You bet I'm going to follow her in.

'I was a fault line ready to give, ' declares the speaker at the outset of Maya Janson's tender, smart and wry book. Janson's poems balance us where the precariousness of what we hold dear, long to understand, resolve--reverberates. Hers is a uniquely different resolution: as she says, 'find a way then lose the way.' I, for one, am grateful to lose and find myself in these wholly original, deeply felt and lyrical poems.

An acute consciousness of duality in life and language shapes Janson's second--utterly astonishing--collection, setting known phrases rogue, and whole poems a-spin. A 'kerchief of defeat' turns out to be 'the headscarf of titivation, ' while clouds surely 'drag their clean cuffs' along the horizon. These poems seek truths about living within doubleness through a divine vision always worldly, witty, musical--and profoundly healing.