“I would fashion my existence of debris” is Meg Shevenock’s apt take on her work: to find value in that which is thought to have none, even trauma. While a live wire of harm and confusion powerfully hums here, the real accomplishment of this book is its intimacy, the degree to which I was allowed to experience a mind creating pattern and sense. I don’t know how to put this—there was almost a double haunting: I became a ghost inside her way of thinking as it came to haunt me. I can’t recall being more movingly reminded that consciousness is an embrace, that what we create is a confession of affection. Here, more than wounds, than breaks, their wake and what can be made of it is loved: “I have defined the day by what I make or not.” Rooted in pain and complexity, The Miraculous, Sometimes is a beautiful meditation on the experience and purpose of art, a demonstration that we live our aesthetics. —Bob Hicok
Meg Shevenock’s THE MIRACULOUS, SOMETIMES is one of the most affecting books I have ever read. The raw, associative sequences move like memory, gauzy one moment and piercing the next, grappling with sex, accountability, violation, and the magnetic lure of the trash. This is a book that rejects rosy narratives of rehabilitation and scorns the maddening adage that everything we seek will come to us once we stop searching. These poems stay with the search; as an eternal searcher myself, they made me feel found. —Natalie Shapero
“I am awed by the generosity of The Miraculous, Sometimes, which spans modes and moods and forms effortlessly, and with brilliant dexterity. All of it held up by precise and beautiful language and compelling narrative structure. This is a beautiful text, which leads a reader through its glorious forest of imagery and imagination.” —Hanif Abdurraqib
