Pre-Order Summer 2024

Launch Date: October 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781941561331

Paperback  |  5.25″ X 8.0″

Winner of the 2023 New American Poetry Prize, Megan Merchant’s new collection Hortensia, in winter will launch on October 1, 2024, and will be available for pre-order at Bookshop.org this summer. Every purchase at Bookshop.org financially supports independent bookstores.

Merchant (she/her) is the owner of the editing, manuscript consultation, and mentoring business Shiversong (www.shiversong.com) and holds an M.F.A. degree in International Creative Writing from UNLV. She is a visual artist and the author of three full-length poetry collections with Glass Lyre Press: Gravel Ghosts (2016), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Award), Grief Flowers (2018), four chapbooks, and a children’s book, These Words I Shaped for You (Penguin Random House). Her book, Before the Fevered Snow, was released in April 2020 with Stillhouse Press (NYT New & Noteworthy). She was awarded the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, judged by Juan Felipe Herrera, the 2018 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, second place in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Inaugural Michelle Boisseau Prize, and, most recently, the New American Poetry Prize. She is the Editor of Pirene’s Fountain. You can find her poetry and artwork at  meganmerchant.wix.com/poet.

Publicity Contact: Summer Hornbostel | summer.hornbostel@newamericanpress.com

Praise for Megan Merchant

“Megan Merchant’s Grief Flowers exposes with unsettling accuracy what loss would look like if we could subject it to an x-ray or place it under a microscope; its irregular divisions, its unforeseen growth, its pain emanating from ever-shifting and unpredictable locations. These poems are most alive and present in their absence, in the spaces Merchant skillfully creates between what we are grateful for, what we will never have, and what we have lost.”
— AMY STRAUSS FRIEDMAN
Author of Gathered Bones are Known to Wander and the forthcoming The Eggshell Skull Rule

“At its heart, Gravel Ghosts is a book that looks at the critical distinction between loneliness and the fine art of being alone. It is a book that seeks to find and maintain a human voice in a world filled with distractions: Love and lightning, despair and the dry desert wind. I awoke unafraid of beginning, the author says, and this well-crafted cycle of poems is filled with that sense of awakening, of opening one’s eyes in a world where every color happens at once, but the source of light is always so difficult to find.”
— JOHN M. BELLINGER 
Editor, The Comstock Review

Like the best wives’ tales and folklore, Megan Merchant’s A Thousand Paper Cranes invents and follows its own strange and wonderful logic: “If two forks are resting / alongside a plate, there will be a wedding”….Merchant’s poems evince “absence a presence,” the in-between, unspoken spaces between her imaginative images revealing an ache, the sting of loss. The micro-world created in this collection reminds me of a bee’s hive, with its energy and detail, its sharp price for sweetness.”
— JENNIFER GIVHAN
Author of Landscape with Headless Mama

“In A Thousand Paper Cranes, Megan Merchant strings poems like folded artifacts along a narrative arc that spans courtship and disillusionment, partnership and death. The complications of love, loss, and gender roles form layers ‘nested in the rutted/veins of this paper.’ Merchant’s language is startling and precise, her offering sensual and rich in sound and image. At the heart of the book is sadness over impermanence, but these poems will remain, knowing as they do ‘how to fold and unfold, /to leave/a crease.’”
— LISKEN VAN PELT DUS
Author of What We’re Made Of