#ArtLitPhx: Four Chambers Presents Jeredith Merrin

 

Jeredith-Merring-Grayson2Four Chambers Press presents poet Jeredith Merrin and her latest chapbook, Owling. Merrin will be reading at The Coronado on Thursday, November 17 at 7 p.m. For more information, please visit the Facebook event.

Jeredith Merrin, brought up in the Pacific Northwest, took her MA in English (specializing in Chaucer), and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Anglo-American Poetry and Poetics. Cup, a special honoree in the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, is her third collection; her previous books are Shift and Bat Ode (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poets series). She’s authored an influential book of criticism on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her reviews and essays (on Moore, Bishop, Clare, Mew, Amichai, and others), and poems have appeared in Paris Review, Slate, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. A retired Professor of English (The Ohio State University), Merrin lives near Phoenix.

#ArtLitPhx: Friday Poetry with Jeredith Merrin at Changing Hands

jeredith-merrinJeredith Merrin will be reading from her new book Owling this Friday, October 14 at 7 p.m. at Changing Hands Tempe. Her latest poetry collection won the 2016 Grayson Books Chapbook competition.

Merrin, brought up in the Pacific Northwest, took her MA in English (specializing in Chaucer), and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Anglo-American Poetry and Poetics. Cup, a special honoree in the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, is her third collection; her previous books are Shift and Bat Ode (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poets series). She’s authored an influential book of criticism on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her reviews and essays (on Moore, Bishop, Clare, Mew, Amichai, and others), and poems have appeared in Paris Review, Slate, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. A retired Professor of English (The Ohio State University), Merrin lives near Phoenix.

For more information, please visit Changing Hands website.

Owling by Jeredith Merrin

Owling by Jeredith Merrin CoverGrayson Books recently published Jeredith Merrin’s chapbook, Owling. Owling won the 2016 Grayson Books Chapbook Competition.

Jeredith describes her book as follows:

The naturalist John Muir wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” In my new chapbook project, each Owl species is observed/described for its own sake, and each species also “hitches” to something else, some set of human behaviors or concerns.  Each owl–who knows how these things happen?–has led me somewhere I didn’t know I was going and has suggested its own form. I have always been interested in natural history as well as psychology, and would like to think this has resulted in an outward- as well as inward-looking poetry.

Below is one of the poems from Owling  (originally published in Zoomorphic and now through Grayson Books).

The Maned Owl
(Jubula lettii:  classified [2013] as “Data Deficient”
by the International Union for Conservation of Nature)
 .
About the maned owl
there is little to tell
because little is known.
It gets its leonine name
from bushy, face-framing
ear tufts. It lives
in Gambon, Cameroon,
Liberia, the Congo
(in what numbers we don’t know),
in closed-canopy rainforest.
Its habits are secretive
and nocturnal.  Presumably,
given heavy lumbering,
its survival’s at risk.
About reproduction and diet,
information is scant.
Its call may be
(we’re not sure)
a low, dove-like coo.
As is the case with
the wide coral reefs,
or with each creature’s
closed-canopy mind,
or with almost anyone’s
mother or father,
too little is known about them.
And then they’re gone.

 

Owling is available online from Grayson Books and Amazon. It is also available at Changing Hands.

Jeredith Merrin at Changing Hands Bookstore

CUP_Final CoverChanging Hands Bookstore in Phoenix:
Reading by Jeredith Merrin
December 8, 2014, 7PM

Author Jeredith Merrin reads from her work CUP with the members of her Piper Writer’s Studio RoundTable. CUP is up for pre-purchase at Amazon.com (with delivery on the CUP’s official release date of December 1), and is available for immediate purchase and delivery at Changing Hands Bookstore and on AbleMusePress.com.