Live long enough, and you can’t tell what’s resignation, what resolve.

A Newsletter from Joanne Merriam

Yooooo it’s a pants-on-head bonkers day but hopefully you’re all doing okay nonetheless. A very quick writerly update:

Recent publications: Three poems out this week: “Patina of a Well-Rained Street” (in Petrichor’s Pebbles section) and “Throwing Signs” and “Tighten to Bruise” (Pictura Journal), online or in pdf, along with an author interview.

Currently reading: The Mirror Visitor Quartet by French author Christelle Dabos, translated by Hildegarde Serle. These are silly but very well-done post-cataclysm/coming-of-age/magician-learning-their-abilities YA novels. I’m just at the beginning of the fourth (and final) book. The story itself is fun, but most of the charm is in the sentence-level observations, and the bonkers world-building of floating arks over an apparently dead Earth containing different families with different magical powers and different treacherous politics.

_{Title is from “Even Bees Know What Zero Is” by Christian Wiman.}

Thanks for being here with me, friend!