The Lillian Trilogy [Paperback]

* Conjuring My Leafy Muse (Book 2) nominated for 2015 Poets' Prize

* Girlie Calendar (Book 3) selected for 2016 ALA Over the Rainbow List

A poet can survive anything but a misprint, wrote Oscar Wilde, flippantly intimating that poets are made half-mad by a world of trouble. One rootless poet lost in trouble, Mary Meriam, found an anchor in The Lillian Trilogy, which combines in one volume her three recently published poetry collections: Word Hot, Conjuring My Leafy Muse, and Girlie Calendar. The poems use a wide variety of poetic forms to capture and command relentless buckets of loss and heartache, revealing the untold horrors of her life and turning them around in a magnificent blossoming of longing, lust, sadness, and wit.

This is very strong, fearless stuff, beautiful.
Rhina P. Espaillat

Mary Meriam is a rare and original poet. This is a dazzling book, a fusion of anguish and wit and song, written in clear and compelling language. I love the wildness, the inventiveness, the always surprising but accurate metaphors. She writes of real things, real people, always musically. She uses Mother Goose rhythms and rhymes or echoes of Sapphic meters or settings as grim as any of the Grimm Brothers tales, to tell searing truths that move, frighten, and delight one with the skill of their telling.
Naomi Replansky

Mary Meriam is a frightening poet, a frighteningly good poet. The intensity of her writing will frighten you, but also her technical skill. She can put a chill into the most common rhyme. The poems speak like a gust of gorgeous / thundering swallows. She identifies her models as Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew, whose Goblin Market and Farmers Bride rightfully haunt the collection. But her real soulmate is Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the ultimate poet of the queer and scary whose masterpiece, Deaths Jest Book, was left appropriately unfinished. She l³‡