Meridian

$10.95

by Kathleen Jesme

A meditation on the death of a mother, Meridian measures the hours and reflects on how experience collapses and elongates time, creating a lens through which we can look at how we’re connected and separated. And the poet asks: Is music our best refusal to accede to the irrationality of death?

by Kathleen Jesme

A meditation on the death of a mother, Meridian measures the hours and reflects on how experience collapses and elongates time, creating a lens through which we can look at how we’re connected and separated. And the poet asks: Is music our best refusal to accede to the irrationality of death?

About the Author

Kathleen Jesme is the author of three previous collections of poetry, The Plum-Stone Game (Ahsahta, 2009); Motherhouse, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize (LSU, 2005); and Fire Eater (Tampa, 2003). Jesme holds an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College and a BA in English from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Minnesota on a tree farm and works as a training consultant.

Advanced Praise

Moving deftly in and out of “the small apartment where my mother lay dying,” laced with memory and opened into aftermath, Meridian is a study, by a probing spirit, in darkness and snow, of private sorrow mirrored in larger patterns: of celestial passage, of excavations in the opened earth. Musically cadenced, contemplative, respectful of silence—these taut, resonant lines bear not one extra ounce of language, but only and exactly what will suffice. — Eleanor Wilner

I have long considered Kathleen Jesme a truly remarkable poet. In Meridian, however, she outdoes herself. Jesme fills this lyric chronicle of the death of her mother with precise observations, strange silences, and breathtaking moments of beauty and music. Whether she dwells on the relentless snow whispering around the house or slips into crystalline recollection of her mother’s slow failure, I sense in these poems a subtle mind at work on an unsolvable problem. For Jesme knows we can find neither clarity nor conclusion in the emptiness death leaves behind, but must always circle around it, reaching for meaning in the images and memories that surround us as we prepare to grieve, and then grieve. “I am swimming toward you,” she writes late in the poem, “through / the past / which clings to me / and holds me / back / and up.” Meridian is not merely a beautifully written, ambitious poem—it is also the most moving I have read in a long time. — Kevin Prufer

“…a sweeping book made up of serial poems—long sequences of short, tonally related lyrics—that … delve deep into the sensuality of brief, everyday occurrences with a radiant clarity… . Many of the poems are thick with aesthetic revelry, and … their cumulative effect can be mesmerizing… . luminous glimpses of various lives.” — from Publishers Weekly’s review of The Plum-Stone Game

“Meridian’s kinetic sculpture of ideas and feeling, line and wind, works beautifully. It will work its way under your skin.” — Ellen Miller-Mack, The Rumpus

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-18-9