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Please keep me close
A poetic exploration of illness, grief, and learning to live in a disabled body.
41 pages, Paperback
Published October 4, 2024
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January 18, 2024
Disclosure: I am (completely and utterly fortunate to be) a friend of the author. Please take my (raving) review with a grain of salt.
Melody Marr’s Please keep me close is an exploration of illness (physical and mental), pain, and grief – all as advertised. Yet it is more. A poignant reflection of the personal, these poems show us how people are strong simply when they have to be.
The poems in this collection occupy a range of themes – from memory, to motherhood, and sadness (both from loss and from the sea of depression that we sometimes find ourselves in). Marr’s poems are sometimes filled with beautiful imagery, sometimes funny, but always piercing in their raw honesty.
I loved the imagery in A song for the dappling of leaves through the window and Dishabille, while Clandestine is adding to my list of favorite morning poems. Homecoming is about finding God close to the hearth and $1.19 is too expensive pushes back against the notion of the artistic elite.
What I loved about these poems was their – or perhaps Marr’s – ability to cut to the heart. Not only is the language accessible, every poem had, for me, one moment where I felt I could relate to it, where I felt like there a person on the other side who understood what I felt – perhaps from a different lens, perhaps under different circumstances from me, but who understood all the same. At the end of the day, isn’t that what art is for – to make you feel part of something larger?
Marr’s first collection is lovely and promising, and I can’t wait to read more of her work in the future.
Melody Marr’s Please keep me close is an exploration of illness (physical and mental), pain, and grief – all as advertised. Yet it is more. A poignant reflection of the personal, these poems show us how people are strong simply when they have to be.
The poems in this collection occupy a range of themes – from memory, to motherhood, and sadness (both from loss and from the sea of depression that we sometimes find ourselves in). Marr’s poems are sometimes filled with beautiful imagery, sometimes funny, but always piercing in their raw honesty.
I loved the imagery in A song for the dappling of leaves through the window and Dishabille, while Clandestine is adding to my list of favorite morning poems. Homecoming is about finding God close to the hearth and $1.19 is too expensive pushes back against the notion of the artistic elite.
What I loved about these poems was their – or perhaps Marr’s – ability to cut to the heart. Not only is the language accessible, every poem had, for me, one moment where I felt I could relate to it, where I felt like there a person on the other side who understood what I felt – perhaps from a different lens, perhaps under different circumstances from me, but who understood all the same. At the end of the day, isn’t that what art is for – to make you feel part of something larger?
Marr’s first collection is lovely and promising, and I can’t wait to read more of her work in the future.
Displaying 1 of 1 review