Review by Rebecca Jane
A Slow Indwelling features two courageous voices that confront pain with poetry. Megan Merchant, a recent winner of the New American Book Prize and author of Hortensia, in Winter weaves her insights about blood, longing, and wreckage with those of Luke Johnson, a father who lives on the California coast, is the author of Quiver, and was a finalist for the Robert Frost residency.
A Slow Indwelling proves that deep conversation between two people, conversation that can explore the revelatory and the dark, is still alive and possible in this age of division and insanity. Throughout the collection, the two address each other as M and L, exploring topics that render them vulnerable: having a child with an illness, parenting today’s neurodiverse children, their own childhood traumas, gun violence, spiritual beliefs, and more.
Though these two poets may have vastly different backgrounds and beliefs, they respond to one another with sensitivity that reaches deeper than a tête-à-tête, reaches deeper than a heart-to-heart. The dialogue grows out of awareness that “winter light is a collision of soft & ice” (17) or “Jung refused the need for levity” (18). Theirs is an honest conversation that courses with emotional insight. L’s first poem expresses his desire: “What I want in these lines”
is origin mist
& static.
Suspension
& stillness &
the body before it shocks (11)
The physical body shows up in a different way for Megan, “the rooms of the body are ravaged by fingerprints & feathers” (17). These differences in perspective, opinion, and experience are handled with dignity and elegance throughout the collection.
Though there is plenty of difference, the human connection here is visceral, showing us how to carefully open up to each other: Megan shares, “There’s a dead pigeon in the shoebox inside my chest. It lives there. I thought you should know” (22). Luke shares “I danced, M / like a lunatic son / when a voice— / I swear to you— / started to speak / said let go loss // & wash clean / How foolish I am. / How desperate” (24). Luke can also infuse Biblical references with fresh perspective and meaning: “When Cain / came near in his // brother’s blood / the Lord let / out a scream // & on his skin / the lightning carved: / here” (13).
Somatic experiences and biblical references work as inroads to wonder: how to be present and capable raising children? L wonders “But when my daughter asks why she bleeds what do I tell her?” (18) He is just as confounded by his daughter’s terrors and sleep walks to the point where he questions his faith in God. M contemplates her son’s sensitivities as they unearth struggle that seems to be beyond explanation or any need for solution. “My son asks / how was the first tree made?” (19)
From the poem “Somatic Memory,” Megan discloses “L, it’s possible to spend this life // trying to solve the arithmetic of longing, / find the one word that does not risk pulling me under” (45). Both voices reveal the limits presented by language—while words help, they also hurt.
Like M’s friend says, “A poem is trying to be seen and hide at the same time” (27). These poems do just that: they reveal psychological depth, but then they keep a lot hidden as well, a contradiction or a natural tendency that effectively upholds the value of mystery.
But the conversation isn’t always connected through emotion or belief or ideas. Instead, images appear differently for one poet then the other: a guitar, black holes, boxes, cigars, bullet wounds, birds, vacant houses, poems under floorboards, gales. These poems harmonize through imagery in exquisite exchange! A reader will enjoy rereading the collection to observe just how these poets dance with words.
A reader comes away with inspiration to connect deeply to another human being. Do we feel safe to approach someone who is living a very different life from ourselves and engage in a poetic dialogue? Though we are all coping with inhuman amounts of grief and rage, perhaps poetic dialogue with one another can lull the inner beasts to sleep? Maybe we can compose a tender reality together, rather than languishing in individuality? These poets help us claim, in both the realms of the body and the realms of the word, we can converse in verse!
A Slow Indwelling by Megan Merchant & Luke Johnson
Small Harbor Publishing, December 2024
79 pages, $18, paper
ISBN: 9781957248387
Rebecca Jane is the author of She Bleeds Sestinas, which was a finalist for a Best Book Award in 2023. She works as a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and poet who travels to Asia to study yoga, Sanskrit, and Mandarin. She lives with her daughters on unceded Kumeyaay land. (San Diego, California).