Winner of the Codhill Poetry Award for 2015.
Description
Linguistically inventive, visually astute, and featuring illustrious attentiveness to the world, Meridian observes solitude in all forms. Coursing through the seasonal cycle of the American Midwest, its poems articulate the delicate veracity of northern landscapes, balanced with the often complicated, estranged nature of the human soul:
"Think of journeys with no destination:
stumbling into stale rooms late at night.
All day, through side windows, blue unfinished cities. "
— from "Nothing Prepared Us"
From frost-covered roads to late-summer marshes, Mark Maire's vision provides a beautifully candid portrayal of an often harsh, but sometimes forgiving world, and the conflicted people within it. Through its devotion to the small, meaningful moments witnessed through a glance out the window or glossed from a touch to the skin, Meridian both stirs and comforts us, a testament to its honest insight into the human condition.
Mark Maire is the author of Clear Day in January, winner of the 2015 Emergence Chapbook Series Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Blueline, Descant, Midwestern Gothic, Minnetonka Review, and Talking River. Maire holds a BA from Grinnell College and an MA from the University of Iowa. He is a longtime resident of Duluth, Minnesota.
Reviews
"Mark Maire rolls down the window for the reader as he drives through physical and emotional landscapes, pointing out the rock walls lining our lives, the abyss of longing beneath a lake's surface, and the conundrums obscured by the dark forests of human consciousness. " — Rebecca Schumejda, author of Waiting at the Dead End Diner
"Maire's quietly visionary poems speak persistently and persuasively to the locations of dislocation. They come at the reader from consistently oblique angles as they record discrepancy after discrepancy, yet they are rooted in a northern world rich in stark distinction. His are truly haunting poems, attuned to how spirit hovers at the corners, the margins, the horizons, but also within us as we grope toward what can never be encompassed but is surely felt. Meridian is a signal achievement. " — Baron Wormser, author of Scattered Chapters