Hive
Lily Poetry Review and Press, 2023
“In Hive, a book-length poem that explores the poetics of the apiary, Suzanne Mercury creates a meadow: a world, a microcosm, a universe which invites the reader into a renewed sense of the world.”
The poetics of the apiary has a long, distinguished history, stretching as far back as Virgil’s Georgics. In Suzanne Mercury’s marvelous HIVE, the cultivation of bees is given a compelling new treatment at both the level of the line and the level of architecture. Drawing on Cornelius Agrippa’s system of magic squares she creates a complexly layered text that encourages multiple ways of reading it. Shot through with wonder and mourning, HIVE operates as a divinatory text, by which random combinations of words and lines intersect to create arresting moments of fissured beauty. It is a work of lyric audacity.
—Patrick Pritchett
Buy:
https://lilypoetryreview.blog/lily-poetry-review-press/hive-by-suzanne-mercury/ (Link)
Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2019
Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs publishes poetic works: subtle and intense forms of public exchange and autonomous expressions—dynamic in awareness—luminous in form, with an emphasis on diversity and interconnection—social, cultural, environmental and aesthetic. I feel deeply honored to be in such company!
“This beautiful chapbook published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (with a vibrant cover collage by editor Brenda Iijima) is a welcome respite from the daily news. Yet contains a different, vital kind of news. Graceful and humane, Mercury’s poems draw out connections between living things, the breathing space between humans and honey bees, oaks and constellations, between the body’s many-sensed conjoined impressions.”
—Andrew K. Peterson
Sold out! Alas!
Xexoxial Editions, 2018
This is a collection of my glass poems, photographed in the changing light of Mount Auburn Cemetery. It is Xexoxial Editions’ first ever full-color Xerolage— the dichroic colors in these pieces are flamboyant and change dramatically depending on the light conditions, so color is really essential to the experience. I am so grateful to mIEKAL aND for making this happen.
“Secretly dwelling near noisy quarrels, in their very insistence on material, metonymic blending, each of Suzanne Mercury’s portmanteau pwoermds comes with a splendid reflection of its own…. Pwoermds, in the to-and-fro of correspondence and open to, as well as the result of, double-reading become transparence. We can linger in front of these poem words or are seen through their granulous letters which pretend to rest on a mirror plane. Or did they arrive from behind the looking-glass, darkly?”
—Rose Franken
Buy: https://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage69/by/suzanne_mercury (Link)