Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs

Andrew Merton

Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs is an exciting debut collection of poetry by veteran journalist and essayist Andrew Merton. Former Poet Laureate of the United States Charles Simic provides an insightful foreword to introduce us to Merton's work.

What Others Say About Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs

Andrew Merton's poems have many qualities that are both pleasurable and startling. He demonstrates the simplicity that is only gained by hard application, he brings a wry approach that flips the reader from an ambience of ironic nostalgia into the abyss of historical violence and personal grief, he mixes a playful surrealism with the knack of capturing both the hilarious and the deadly, and pulls off the visual psychologist's trick of making the familiar strange and puzzling. All of this is delivered in that most serious of all modes, a graceful sense of humour. This is one of those collections you will often re-read.

—Rory Brennan

What is the national anthem of the country Andrew Merton inhabits? I think I hear ukuleles, and "the off-key bleats of a cracked bone kazoo" riffing out its tune. The music reminds us of the taste of five tart bites of a last peach, of our mother's ashes, of a galaxy blooming in a worn wicker basket. Relish these poems that will linger in your ear like a lover's cry. In the motherland of our broken and patched human minds, Merton sketches time's passage in lines as fluid as "a leaf in an uncertain breeze." Most of all, Merton teaches us to be a poem at any given moment of our lives.

—Jeanie Thompson

A live current of existential terror, honestly engaged, runs through Andrew Merton's Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs. The threats sometimes come from a sense of the abyss within, sometimes from the silent distances between us, and at other times from the irreparable wounds of history. Yet these threats are only part of the story that Merton's poetry tells. This is a book of restless imaginative energy, of surreal premises, of dream-like transformations, of a vision creatively skewed so as to see reality as if for the first time. Within all their terrors and transformations these poems brim with delight and astonishment at the minute particulars of our existence, the facts that are, as Frost once said, "the sweetest dream that labor knows."

—Fred Marchant

Time Travel in the Grand Canyon

My boy is too close to the edge,
scanning the cliffs for dinosaurs.

Maybe I should tell him how time accelerates,
how it took four billion years

for these rocks to form
but only thirty thousand

for the river to slice through them.
How last week,

when the wind blew a woman off the rim,
it took her less than a minute

to drop down through the ages,
her shadow on the canyon wall

already a ghost.

Details and Ordering

Publication Date: March 1, 2012
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-09-4
Price: $12.00

Limited availability.
Please contact accents.publishing@gmail.com before ordering this book.

About the Author

Andrew Merton has been a political reporter and columnist for the Gloucester (Massachusetts) Times, The Boston Herald Traveler and the Boston Globe, and a contributing editor with Boston Magazine. His articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, Yankee Magazine and The Boston Phoenix. His book Enemies of Choice was published by Beacon Press in 1980, and his anthology In Your Own Voice: A Writer's Reader was published by HarperCollins in 1995. His poetry has appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Powhatan Review, Paper Street, The Comstock Review, Silk Road, Third Wednesday, The American Journal of Nursing and elsewhere. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire.
http://www.andrewmertonpoetry.com.

Photo by Gail Kelley