Before the Fevered Snow - by Megan Merchant (Paperback)

About the Book

"In her fourth collection, celebrated poet and author Megan Merchant uses the natural world as her canvas, mapping the abstract shape of the American social consciousness onto a wintry landscape of marriage, motherhood, and grief. Suffused with autumnal decay and the silent promise of snow, Merchant's collection serves as a powerful distillation of the ageless themes of memory and loss"--

Book Synopsis

YOU WANT A STORY OF PROGRESS, BUT IT'S FALL.

In her fourth collection, celebrated poet and author Megan Merchant uses the natural world as her canvas, mapping the abstract shape of the American social consciousness onto a wintry landscape of marriage, motherhood, and grief.

Suffused with autumnal decay and the silent promise of snow, Merchant's collection serves as a powerful distillation of the ageless themes of memory and loss.

Review Quotes

"Megan Merchant's poetry has the sudden fall into dream, tenderness, awakenings and delicate and crystalline images--the tone and lines are just right and seem to be in the language of a forest at night and the unseen eye in the wave."​

- Juan Felipe Herrera, 2017 U.S. Poet Laureate & author of Everyday We Get More Illegal

"Merchant invites--demands--us to enter through 'dark doorways' where crows, owls, bones, and spiders litter the 'bluetiful' American landscape. This is a fraught place, strewn with guns and horses, bound by 'the thick tissue of motherhood, ' and, like most things American, elegiac."

- Jennifer Martelli, author of The Uncanny Valley and My Tarantella

"This is a book of caretaking against grief. Megan Merchant draws her poems chiaroscuro with shadow and light, caught like Eurydice between the passing things of this world, where a crow's 'feathers make dark doorways in the snow.'"

- Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow