Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs

Poetry March 2012 ISBN 978-1-936628-09-4 102 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

"Andrew Merton's poems have many qualities that are both pleasurable and startling. He demonstrates the simplicity that is only gained by hard application, he brings a wry approach that flips the reader from an ambience of ironic nostalgia into the abyss of historical violence and personal grief, he mixes a playful surrealism with the knack of capturing both the hilarious and the deadly, and pulls off the visual psychologist's trick of making the familiar strange and puzzling. All of this is delivered in that most serious of all modes, a graceful sense of humour. This is one of those collections you will often re-read." - Rory Brennan

grief

From the Book

Time Travel in the Grand Canyon

My boy is too close to the edge, scanning the cliffs for dinosaurs.

Maybe I should tell him how time accelerates, how it took four billion years

for these rocks to form but only thirty thousand

for the river to slice through them. How last week,

when the wind blew a woman off the rim, it took her less than a minute

to drop down through the ages, her shadow on the canyon wall

already a ghost.

What Others Say

Andrew Merton's poems have many qualities that are both pleasurable and startling. He demonstrates the simplicity that is only gained by hard application, he brings a wry approach that flips the reader from an ambience of ironic nostalgia into the abyss of historical violence and personal grief, he mixes a playful surrealism with the knack of capturing both the hilarious and the deadly, and pulls off the visual psychologist's trick of making the familiar strange and puzzling. All of this is delivered in that most serious of all modes, a graceful sense of humour. This is one of those collections you will often re-read.

— Rory Brennan

What is the national anthem of the country Andrew Merton inhabits? I think I hear ukuleles, and "the off-key bleats of a cracked bone kazoo" riffing out its tune. The music reminds us of the taste of five tart bites of a last peach, of our mother's ashes, of a galaxy blooming in a worn wicker basket. Relish these poems that will linger in your ear like a lover's cry. In the motherland of our broken and patched human minds, Merton sketches time's passage in lines as fluid as "a leaf in an uncertain breeze." Most of all, Merton teaches us to be a poem at any given moment of our lives.

— Jeanie Thompson

A live current of existential terror, honestly engaged, runs through Andrew Merton's Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs. The threats sometimes come from a sense of the abyss within, sometimes from the silent distances between us, and at other times from the irreparable wounds of history. Yet these threats are only part of the story that Merton's poetry tells. This is a book of restless imaginative energy, of surreal premises, of dream-like transformations, of a vision creatively skewed so as to see reality as if for the first time. Within all their terrors and transformations these poems brim with delight and astonishment at the minute particulars of our existence, the facts that are, as Frost once said, "the sweetest dream that labor knows.

— Fred Marchant

About the Author

Andrew Merton

Andrew Merton is a journalist, essayist, and poet. Publications in which his work has appeared include Esquire, Ms. Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, and the Boston Globe. His book Enemies of Choice: The Right-to-Life Movement and Its Threat to Abortion, was published by Beacon Press in 1981. His poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Rialto, Comstock Review, Louisville Review, Vine Leaves, the American Journal of Nursing, and elsewhere. (If he were to found a literary review, he would call it Elsewhere.) Merton's first book of poetry, Evidence that We are Descended from Chairs, with a foreword by Charles Simic (Accents Publishing, 2012), was named Outstanding Book of Poetry for 2013-2014 by the New Hampshire Writers' Project. His books of poetry Lost and Found (2016) and Final Exam (2019) were also published by Accents Publishing. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire.