Vestiges

Vestiges is a gripping and haunting book, ruminating on loss but balancing this with an allure of possibility where, in the book's first poem, "A spent blue sky tenders solace." In elegy, allegory, lyrical poems and children's stories, there is wicked humor, self-irony and bravery. A blunt honesty runs through this collection, demonstrated in one poem, where the speaker wonders: "The house / is a bucket of wounds and ruin. / I'm gambling which of us goes first." With a playfulness of language, coupled with associative leaps and startling imagery, these poems are a powerful reminder over and over of what it is to be alive.

-Carol V. Davis, Author of Because I Cannot Leave This Body



Walking into a poem in Mercedes Lawry's Vestiges is like walking into a lyric Cabinet of Curiosities, a wonder room, a Joseph Cornell box, where you are surrounded by characters, voices, landscapes, and personal oddities. There is a surprise around every "sly verb," a secret behind every line, a fuse attached to each image. The language is so tight you have to squeeze between the cracks, circle back, "dig and cut, dig and cut." Find sadness, grief, beauty, and even humor. Each poem is like "a pie filled with the breath/of babies or whatever I can conjure./ What a fine idea. I set to it." There is much conjuring going on here. Like the renegade's lover in "How to Live, an Option," Lawry is a renegade poet moving through a world "showing its fangs." And she is here to "remark it."

-Anita Skeen, Founding Director, RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University and Series Editor, Wheelbarrow Books