Parking Meters into Mermaids

<p>Poems of growing up and growing older holding on and letting go paying tribute while always paying attention to the sidewalk cracks and the small itchy places. </p><p><br></p><p>Memories [g]one like steam from the glass yet recaptured in Merrill Oliver Douglas's calm level gaze. These quiet uncompromising accounts are both more loving and more revealing for their refusal of sentiment. Funny rueful opening on unexpected depths but above all accepting-her poems celebrate the everyday weather of home.</p><p><strong> -Stephanie Strickland</strong> author of <em>How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected </em>and <em>Ringing the Changes</em></p><p><br></p><p>Merrill Oliver Douglas' <em>Parking Meters into Mermaids</em> is rich with transformation: daughter to mother body to spirit domestic to global. Summer in My Early Twenties includes the lines Nights when the t-shirt stuck to my back / and I could feel the hairs sprout on my legs / why didn't some grayer fatter woman // sit me down and say 'Sweetie this isn't your life. / This is weather.' Harvest describes a pepper's unlikely winter bloom as a small fruit gnarled // as a toothless gnome. The poem abruptly shifts: We won't eat it. / It's not food we're after // just this off-kilter out-of- / proportion pleasure of seeing / kinked bare bones give birth. Each poem in this collection shimmers with off-kilter out-of-proportion pleasure.</p><p><strong> -Suzanne Cleary</strong> author of<em> Beauty Mark </em>(2013) and <em>Crude Angel</em> (2018) both from BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City)</p><p><br></p>