Description:
Throughout this splendid book, grounded in the intimate joys and trepidations of new motherhood, there is an undercurrent of foreboding about the kind of world we are bequeathing to our children-a world ravaged by environmental degradation and political strife. But Meghan Sterling's unflinching depiction of the imperiled world that her daughter will likely inherit is tempered by the abiding lessons of her Jewish ancestral history, a reverence for the natural world in all its seemingly unstoppable splendor, and an unquenchable hope that the future is ours to redeem: ". . . to you I bequeath / all the courage / of birds and flowers, / water and stones, / to love enough, / to love with the toughness of trees."
-Richard Foerster
Brief description: Meghan Sterling is co-editor of the anthology A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis and Assocate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review. Her work has been published in Rattle, Balancing Act 2, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Sky Island Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. She has been a Dibner Fellow at the 2020 Black Fly Writer's Retreat and a Hewnoaks Artist Colony Resident in 2019 and 2021. Her chapbook, How We Drift, was published by Blue Lyra Press in 2016. She lives in Portland, Maine, with her family. These Few Seeds is her debut full-length poetry collection.
Review Quotes:
If you are looking for poems threaded with fire and mother-love, you will find them in These Few Seeds. Sterling uses the gifts of poetry to dig up the past, dig into the present, and render us witnesses to the beauty and destruction in our modern world. With the ability to enter into an unknown element and make it hers, she becomes beached jellyfish, a field of wildflowers, a cockroach, barnacles. Though she offers us the reality of shattered blossoms and razed forests, the endings of her poems lead to new beginnings. She says she will tell the truth, with these hideous wings, / this coward's heart, and she does. This earthy love is what she shares in the reverberant heart of her poems. -Judy Kaber
Meghan Sterling's new collection teaches us to bloom from the wreckage of what we were a moment ago. Her poems are brilliant watercolors, reveling in fluidity, and in the mutability of the boundaries we draw-between countries, between periods of time, between people. In a voice that manages to be both conversational and incantatory, she celebrates our capacity to inhabit many identities at once-parent, child, lover, stranger, ghost. Sterling's poetry dares us to love a world that is always coming apart somewhere and reminds us that a seed must split its skin to grow. -Suzanne Langlois