Waystations

“Am I travelling with or against the current circumstances?” asks Amanda Merritt in her wide-ranging and deeply moving second collection, Waystations. Mourning pregnancy losses, Merrit meticulously and mellifluously traces the transitory times and spaces that surround moments of great grief and change. In poems that cross continents—from a New York City subway car to a monastery in Greece—Merritt searches for, and finds, consolation, complication, and even hope. Her embodied, apostrophic verse transforms absence into presence and silence into song. “Already the honeysuckle / and lavender have grown back / through crossties,” she writes, “surviving / as some things are meant to.”