Description: Meghan Sterling's 7th poetry collection, Sick Letters from the Lovened, is a confrontation between chronic illness and motherhood, and a celebration of the challenges and joys of modern life. Made up of mostly sonnets-love, longing, a romantic obsession with death, and wry sense of self-deprecating humor are all tangled in these poems often written from the perspective of being sick in bed.
In "Sonnet for My Beautiful Asthma", Sterling writes: How invisible, how meteoric- nights I wake propped up on pillows like Emily Dickenson, coughing delicate into the handkerchief as I lay dying...How senseless, how euphoric-the stars in the dark were of my mind's making, weathering the black with the constant spark of fever, the dark punctuated with my foamy breath. How I am all fish, all water, all crest and bubble. How extraordinary, how oceanic, to drown beneath the weight of sodden lungs. At times epistolary, written to her changing body, Sterling laments and glamorizes the experience of aging and midlife, all while juggling the ambivalence of raising a child in a post-Covid world.