ghost exhibit

by Melissa Atkinson Mercer

ghost exhibit begins with the declaration of vows: "I a woman called girl take you a man called ghost // called beast". In this amazing sequence, Melissa Atkinson Mercer has curated the lives of a family navigating the complexities of race, class, and religion while they try to stay faithful to the bonds that pulled them together. Part modern museum exhibition, part evidence in the trials of our contemporary society, these poetic exhibits root themselves in the daily details of a life while making those details mythic, epic even. "if my eggs hatch a miracle // by which I mean monster", Mercer writes, "as someone who wears the wrong gown // the wrong pain // yes this pain // yes I am talking to you". Marriage rites, funeral rites, the rites of living, all are examined in this haunting and haunted poetic convocation.

Genres: Poetry

19 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2018

About the author

Melissa Atkinson Mercer's work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal; Moon City Review; A Portrait in Blues: An Anthology of Identity, Gender, and Bodies; and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from West Virginia University, where she won the Russell MacDonald Creative Writing Award in Poetry. She currently writes and teaches at Lees-McRae College.

Reviews

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

As if comma has been unspelled and period, hidden, Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s ghost exhibit is breathless, but not winded, and crumbles dirt over bread crumb as it makes its way by spiritual detour toward excavation’s replica with the knowledge that forgiveness is a human shortcut.

How creatively we root the artless insult and take the phantom’s blood for vivid milk. How hands-free these poems, here, pray in the privacy of their author’s creatural ask. How earthly their declarations. How open they are to the second language of the reader’s eye.

How oh we recite before learning to speak.

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great chapbook! Very short--looking forward to more from this poet.