Dispatch from Every Second Guess - by Megan Gannon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A verse-memoir spanning the breakdown of a marriage and the resulting wide-open horizon of single motherhood, Dispatch From Every Second Guess explores how we negotiate the present in the light of the past, how our lingering resentments limit our attentions, and how old wounds reopen in new ways.

Gannon's life is layered with tensions. The tension of being a white adoptive mother to a Black son. The tension of healing from a failed marriage. The tension of supporting a partner through mental health crises. The tension of mothering the partner's child in the shadow of a fraught relationship with one's own mother. And the tension of admitting ugly truths in a genre that often demands beauty, especially from women poets.

Perfect for fans of Sharon Olds and Maggie Smith, Gannon's second full-length collection of poetry is rife with poignant self-reflection and lyrical storytelling as she writes her way toward understanding, and maybe even forgiveness.

Review Quotes

"'No one will call this book beautiful, ' Megan Gannon states matter-of-factly in one of her dispatches. Gannon writes from the complicated center of families both broken and blended; as the divorced mother of two sons (one Black, one white; one she gave birth to, one the biological son of another mother); as the stepmother of another woman's daughter; as a daughter estranged from her own mother. Her personal complications intersect with the social/political realities of racism and sexism compelling her to 'write the things I don't want to say.' Her poems cobble 'broken bits / and detritus . . . into new likenesses.' And that is a thing of beauty."

-Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New & Selected Poems.

"In Dispatch from Every Second Guess, Megan Gannon delivers a fearless verse memoir traversing the intimate terrains of motherhood, race, divorce, grief, and artistic reckoning. With a lyric voice at once personal and political, Gannon excavates the violence embedded in care and the paradox of holding love through the world's impossibilities. Across poem-dispatches sutured to a taut couplet form, Gannon writes from 'the day's small breaks and burns, ' charting what it means to survive love, to parent, to persist in visibility within a world that rewards disappearance.

I love this book for how it complicates easy frames for understanding motherhood and love, for how it reveals that life itself foils our best-laid plans, and for all the tenderness crouched deep inside its hard edges. Dispatch from Every Second Guess reminds us of what poetry can still do: bear witness, second guess, revise the self, and insist--again and again--on the fragile art of remaining visible in one's own life."--Jessica Q. Stark, author of Buffalo Girl and Poetry Editor for AGNI
"In Dispatch from Every Second Guess, Megan Gannon skillfully interweaves structural and aesthetic innovation with layered narrative depth and propulsive energy. The repetition of the dispatch form reinforces the paradoxes of time, memory, and emotion--how within the sequence of days, some experiences fade while others strengthen and haunt. 'Anyone can tell you what becomes of hunger: ' Gannon writes in the collection's searching, wise, and intimate voice, 'always the widening where the weather / comes from, the narrow throat making a mess / of its urgent searching, and the wanting / is the center of the still.'" --Jonathan Fink, author of Don't Do It--We Love You, My Heart