On the Mercy Me Planet

There's no sum I wouldn't pay for an unfractious passage, to be a slow river on a map, a single blade of uncut grass. In these elegant, sparkling poems, Maya Janson writes about life's contradictory, mercurial nature with wit and warmth. Her imagination is expansive, her images surprising and delightful. "Beware the urge to haul everything you own/ to the top of a mountain in order to hurl it," she writes in 'Pushing the Dead Chevy.' The poems in On the Mercy Me Planet, personal and intimate, ponder the duality in daily life, that it is both traumatic and triumphant, that we understand and yet know nothing. "In mythology the pomegranate/is said to signify the underworld. In real life,/ a simple granite headstone will do." Despite death, loss, injury and breakups, diagnoses and climate change, in Janson's poems the sea still laps against the shore, the rower still goes in, out, and back in again. "Find the way then lose the way. Repeat."