Melissa Atkinson Mercer
ISBN: 978-0-9975805-8-7
19 pages
What makes Melissa Atkinson Mercer's ghost exhibit a singular assemblage is the way time wrestles with place, voice, and image. Here, Mercer avalanches a modern Spoon River Anthology, wherein memory tries to reconcile with the ghosts of one's hometown, the scars our families tender us, how racism produces a distorted version of what the world can be. Momentum and precision create some of the most stunning moments in this chapbook: "the nest of deer whispers to itself like a lost city"; "the same girl inside a rabbit's lucky foot inside a coffin in the church between my bones"; "sick as a wolf in the last cave of dawn." ghost exhibit transforms us with incantation, reassertion, command. One feels as though Mercer is performing an excavation, an exhumation, after "the metaphor inside the metaphor," where one locates "which monster consumes the other." The spectral tribunal requests the evidence. Mercer's poetry is after justice.
Glass Poetry Press
Precision · Vision · Inclusion
ghost exhibit
— Roy Guzm���n, author of Restored Mural for Orlando
The ghosts in Melissa Atkinson Mercer's ghost exhibit gather and glimmer behind her shifting, shimmering lines. These poems indeed sing an unearthly song; note by note, Mercer builds a town haunted by its own inhabitants and their history. Mercer maintains a restless sense of mystery so compelling I couldn't put the book down until I'd reached the end. These are poems that stick in the back of the mind, like a specter reminding one of what it means to be human, to live and to see.
— Emma Bolden, author of medi(t)ations
Melissa Atkinson Mercer's ghost exhibit has managed to carve out poignant moments that embody small town life to illuminate the chaos and frustrations experienced in contemporary America — racism and civil unrest. Mercer observes a "town filled with beasts" and she expresses the need to "record what happened" around her and potentially to be rescued from these moments of rural life. These poems record a view into Mercer's "lost city" and the reader is invited to observe the beauty and the beasts that exist in the "sweet apocalypse" of our daily lives.
— Ruben Quesada, author of Next Extinct Mammal
Sample poem from ghost exhibit:
9 . 1
if I voracious // venomous // if I violence and vitriol // surrender // better yet if I approximate wisdom // if I ferment and tomb // if my eggs hatch a miracle // by which I mean monster // if winged horses murmur in my sweet throat // if we take pictures of the libraries // of the markets // of the broken barns // before anyone tells us not to // before anyone thinks to ask // what we are holding // if bees land on our warm hands // if they mistake us for what blooms // for what can bloom // if you want to drive across each state and I want to stand in them // all at the same time // if that doesn't tell you // to listen // if dusk comes like a ghost's mouth and yes I inhabit // as someone who is guilty // as someone who wears the wrong gown // the wrong pain // yes this pain // yes I am talking to you
Cover by Olivia Rose Edvalson
$8.50
Melissa Atkinson Mercer is the author of the full-length poetry collections Knock (Half Mystic Press, 2018) and Saint of the Partial Apology (Five Oaks Press, 2017), as well as five chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared iinTinderbox Poetry Journal, Moon City Review, A Portrait in Blues: An Anthology of Identity, Gender, and Bodies, and others. She has an MFA from West Virginia University, where she won the Russell MacDonald Creative Writing Award in Poetry. She currently works and teaches at Lees-McRae College.
