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Melissa Atkinson Mercer is the author of the full-length poetry collections Saint of the Partial Apology and Knock, as well as five chapbooks. Her work has appeared in print and online journals and has been anthologized in A Portrait in Blues: An Anthology of Gender, Identity, and Bodies and Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulism. She has an MFA from West Virginia University, where she won the Russell Macdonald Creative Writing Award in Poetry.

PRAISE FOR SAINT OF THE PARTIAL APOLOGY:

In Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s Saint of the Partial Apology, I’ve rediscovered the terrifying pleasures of awe, of limbs that part like orchids in black rain, of maps made from wolves’ feet, of “the white church of the rabbit’s jaw.” I’ve discovered the most tender rage in these pages, but here, here Mercer also offers a dark and certain light to bury myself in. These poems want to confound you, and you should let them. Enjoy their witch-dark and loose miracles. This book is a lostness worthy of every pilgrim.

-Traci Brimhall, author of Our Lady of the Ruins and Saudade

PRAISE FOR KNOCK:

The incantatory poems in Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s Knock “speak miracle and rage,” insistent as daybreak or high tide. These poems are reclamation spells that celebrate and reassemble the untamed, the “witch heart,” the “undarkened bell” of speech: where “mountains are the tongues of women buried for the sin of lust” and “the sea is the tongue of the woman who loved kings.” As elegiac as it is visionary, this collection invokes a “matriarchal oath” to bless the darkness inside and around us.

—Emari DiGiorgio, author of The Things a Body Might Become and Girl Torpedo