Killer Poems

Poetry June 2023 ISBN 978-1-961127-00-5 86 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

Killer Poems is the fourth poetry collection by New Hampshire poet Andrew Merton. His signature humor and wit, as well as his penchant for the absurd are brought to a new level in these irreverent poems of intrigue and depth.

"In Andrew Merton's view of poetry, brevity is the soul of wisdom. His poems are compact. He likes plenty of white space around some image or pithy utterance … Merton is like some elderly neighbor, someone we pass on the street for years without a second look, someone who—when we finally exchange a few sentences—seems to be thinking and worrying about many of the same things we have, someone we would like to spend more time with from now on."—Charles Simic

humor

From the Book

No Need to Stop What You're Doing

Searching for the best baguette in Paris

or Louisville

Tunneling out of prison

Transposing the score of Aida for solo trombone

Contemplating Einstein in exile

Taking up curling

Hacking into the Kremlin

Resuming your quest for the last ivory-billed woodpecker

Tackling, at long last, Finnegans Wake

Either that asteroid you've been hearing about

will miss the earth

or not.

What Others Say

This poet pinpoints the extraordinary in the day to day; he makes the reader see things anew, and even when they appear tawdry and tough, they are rich and sweet. The calm and gentle voice of these poems is nevertheless fierce in its focus on life, aging, disappointment and death, and that makes for the tremendous tension that keeps each poem taut with drama, inviting from the very first line, and powerfully moving until its conclusion.

— John Skoyles

In Andrew Merton's view of poetry, brevity is the soul of wisdom. His poems are compact. He likes plenty of white space around some image or pithy utterance … Merton is like some elderly neighbor, someone we pass on the street for years without a second look, someone who—when we finally exchange a few sentences—seems to be thinking and worrying about many of the same things we have, someone we would like to spend more time with from now on.

— Charles Simic

Merton 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 humor.

— Rory Brennan

Echoing the work of Kenneth Koch, Billy Collins and Albert Goldbarth, here comes another poet primed to tickle and provoke. Simultaneously wise and hilarious, Merton somehow plumbs issues like depression, selfloathing, regret, grief and finds its funny lining.

— Julia Shipley

If Andy Merton's poems were baseball caps, they wouldn't say "Make America Great Again," they'd say "Make America Sane Again.

— David Rivard

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.