{"product_id":"9780692216729","title":"Girlie Calendar","description":"\u003cb\u003e* Selected for the 2016 American Library Association Over the Rainbow List\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eSong is mysterious. It seems to arise when the separation between sophistication and simplicity has been submerged in deep water. Song is that ringing-out of the wrung heart whereby what is personal becomes what is universal-and so it is fitting that all the archetypal seasons in Mary Meriam's \u003ci\u003eGirlie Calendar\u003c\/i\u003e have their own specific songs to share, their own ardent delights. Yet these delights are hard-fought, because song is also that inspiring moment of transcendence so in evidence in the courage of these lines: \"A knife of pain may bend you over double, \/ but hover, swing from your trapeze, breathe.\" Mary Meriam's songs are thus both breath-taking and breath-giving. Indeed, there is a rigor of architecture in these poems, as well as in the construction of the book as a whole, that is exacting, deliberate, astonishingly disciplined-and yet surrendering to such songs, as a reader, seems as natural as breathing. \"Let steel become a sigh,\" she sings to herself in her month of August. Those five words rise and fall as an exquisitely fragile monument to all song. I would even go so far as to say that they are a powerful medicine for what ails us.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e-R. Nemo Hill, Author of \u003ci\u003eWhen Men Bow Down\u003c\/i\u003e and Publisher of EXOT Books\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Headmistress Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49778309005552,"sku":"9780692216729","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780692216729_p0.jpg?v=1780089449","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780692216729","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}