A Slow Indwelling - Paperback

by Luke Johnson (Author), Megan Merchant (Author)

A Slow Indwelling is a lyrically charged epistolary exchange that explores the themes of parenthood, grief, nature, and violence. In this collection, two poets refuse to flinch, engaging in conversation with the ghosts that haunt them. The book invites the reader into the kind of space created when honesty takes precedence over artifice and where vulnerability is offered without hesitation. "These poems are entombed with lilacs and bullet casings," explain the poets. "Sometimes we lose what's most important to us and fill it in with phantoms."

Megan Merchant (she/her) is the owner of www.shiversong.com and holds an M.F.A. degree in International Creative Writing from UNLV. She is the author of three full-length collections with Glass Lyre Press, four chapbooks, and a children's book, These Words I Shaped for You (Penguin Random House). Her book, Before the Fevered Snow, was released in April 2020 with Stillhouse Press (NYT New & Noteworthy). She was awarded the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, the 2018 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, the Inaugural Michelle Boisseau Prize and most recently the New American Poetry Prize. She is the Editor of Pirene's Fountain. You can find her poems and artwork at meganmerchant.wix.com/poet.

Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for the Jake Adam York Award, The Vassar Miller Prize, and The Levis Award; A Slow Indwelling (Harbor Editions 2024); and Distributary (Texas Review Press 2025). Quiver was recently named one of four finalists for The California Book Award. Johnson was selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the esteemed 2024 Robert Frost Residency through Dartmouth College. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.