News

“Madder: A Memoir In Weeds” by Marco Wilkinson
Reviewed by Meredith Boe
Another Chicago Magazine
February 3, 2022

“The persistence of weeds makes them like facts, particularly the more challenging truths we bury deep and hope to never dig up. Weeds emerge nonetheless, seemingly at their own will. Horticulturist, writer, and editor Marco Wilkinson’s first book, Madder: A Memoir in Weeds, is a coming to terms with these weeds, the secrets mothers keep from their children and that families avoid discussing at all costs. Wilkinson writes the uncertainty of selfhood and lineage with a confidence that comes only with aged meditation—he mixes dream with reality, and bends time, space, and memory. Madder is a set of experimental essays that often read as poetry, demonstrating his fragmented upbringing with themes and language that wind, roots finding their way through sediment.”

Read the full review here.

Fruit Bat Press has published A Very Chicago December, a chapbook of collected works by 34 Chicago-affiliated artists, photographers, poets, and prose-writers. This was a homemade, limited-edition chapbook, featuring works by:

Howard Axelrod | Lucas Baisch | Trevor Bates | Logan Berry | Meredith Boe
Steph Bong | J. Nicole Brooks | Stuart Dybek | Catherine Eves | Dylan Fahoome
Julia Fine | Andy Fleischer | Rebecca Johns | Osiris Khepera | Megan Kirby
Robert Loerzel | Taylor Mansheim | Juan Martinez | Timothy Moore
Whet Moser | Marjorie Muller | Daniela Olszewska | Gina O’Neill | Kailah Peters
Eric Plattner | Sully Ratke | Rachel Robbins | Beth Rooney | Kathleen Rooney
Jewells Santos | Martin Seay | Sage Skaar | Kirk Vaclavik | Noah Whittiker

Book Made By:

Caroline Macon Fleischer – Creative Director
Vada Briceño – Book Designer

Find out more about Fruit Bat Press here.

 

American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans is a collective response to the individual suffering behind the statistics. Big Shoulders Books editor Chris Green asked one-hundred poets from across the city to take turns writing a communal poem about Chicago’s gun violence. The poets range in age, gender, race, ethnicity, and poetic experience. Such well-known poets as Ed Hirsch, Haki Madhubuti, Ed Roberson, Marc Smith, Ana Castillo, and Kevin Coval write with teen poets from the South and West sides . . . many from the group Young Chicago Authors, but also young poets from Chicago’s alternative high schools, where statistically, students experience the most gun violence in the city.

The poem is a pantoum, a poetic form where every line is repeated twice. Green chose this form because its structure of repeating lines mirrors the semi-automatic firing of a weapon and also the seemingly endless cycle of shootings in Chicago.

In 2019, Chicago police seized over 10,000 guns—an average of one gun every 48 minutes, which gives you a sense of how many weapons are on the streets. However, the main title of this poem, American Gun, points to the gun epidemic as not simply a Chicago problem, but an American one. Despite the rhetoric of conservative political and corporate interests, most Americans (including NRA members) want more sensible gun laws. Our country needs more truth, more collaboration—something like this poem where diverse people sing together in sanity and beauty. When politics fails us, poetry tells us we are not alone in our outrage and hope.

Download a FREE digital copy of American Gun here.

Paper Nautilus has announced the release of Meredith Boe’s What City, a chapbook of prose and winner of the 2018 Debut Series Chapbook Contest.

These stories and essays received the following praise:

“Moving with deft concision from location to location, this collection of eight pieces of brief prose feels like wandering through a city and stumbling upon treasure: a geocache of place and its associated feeling–not just where things happen, but how and why they matter. The stories leave the reader with a soft illumination, the way ‘lightning bugs emerge from a blanket of black sky.’”

— Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“In What City Meredith Boe’s prose inhabits neighborhoods of circumstance and memory. These essays delicately navigate love, loss, and moments of being, tracking terrains both intimate and urban. What city? Her city.”

—Barrie Jean Borich, author of Apocalypse, Darling and Body Geographic

Order your copy here or visit Meredith’s Contact page!

Voyage Chicago interviewed Meredith recently as part of their Most Inspiring Stories series.

On the freelance lifestyle:

“Taking such a big risk wasn’t easy. Work sometimes still bleeds into my evenings or weekends. But that usually happens when I spend part of my day doing something fun, like going to the beach, working on a creative project, or volunteering. So, it’s worth it, to me. When I’m doing something I want to be doing for work, it doesn’t usually feel like I’m working ‘after hours.’

That being said, the work is not always sunshine and rainbows. There are days when I don’t feel like working, as with any job; even if you love it. Writing for a living requires a lot of focus and precision, so my editors can tell if I have an off day! It’s hard.”

“Unremembered Skies and Snows” by Meredith Boe

Your hands have always looked too big to hold those meek potatoes. Fingernails peeling and callouses dirt crusted, you hand me a bag of freshly plucked reds and yellows, caked in mud that I’ll wash off later in my Chicago kitchen sink. I still have never seen you happier than when you aren’t driving your truck and can tend to vegetables.

Your hands have been gripped around more Bud Lights than all the plastic six-pack yokes in the ocean, and in cuffs on occasion. They’ve yanked a decaying tooth, no doubt. Long ago carried candles as an altar boy. Shoveled snow gloveless in the dark morning hours, just as the cows begin to stir in the field beyond the barn. Just as distant suns unwillingly fade, yielding to light.

Read the rest in the Chicago Reader here.

Meredith Boe’s short prose collection What City was chosen as a winner of Paper Nautilus’s 2018 Debut Series Chapbook Contest.

Expected release is in early 2019!

https://readpapernautilus.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/announcing-the-2018-debut-series-chapbook-contest-winners/?fbclid=IwAR34MDa6YWWawGKX0AGzpJR9HuqtqZ85CIQ19IvLEQkucb4AoRYubfxAvMg

The current issue of After Hours, Issue 35, features Meredith’s poem “Octopus,” originally written with the Chicago poems-on-demand group Poems While You Wait. Check out the PWYW Tumblr here.

I was able to celebrate Poetry Month this past April with a poem published in Burningword Lit. Journal. You can read “After the War” online here: https://www.burningword.com/2017/04/after-the-war/

If you want to buy the whole issue (which I suggest!) you can purchase it through Magcloud.

Minimal Space and More Precise Details

“Once you start writing poetry, it starts to influence everything; thoughts, emails, texts, so of course the rest of my prose is affected. Each word, each blank space, each punctuation mark must represent something in a poem, and now I’m able to use that mentality when approaching prose. Hopefully that can only make my writing better and more interesting.”

http://mudseasonreview.com/2017/02/minimal-space-and-more-precise-details/