Purchase A Slow Indwelling.
Cover art: Evolution, Megan Merchant
Praise for A Slow Indwelling:
In this superb series of epistolary poems, Luke Johson and Megan Merchant probe the fears and anxieties they face as loving parents in a fraught world. Their exchanges are marked by a lyricism that constantly surprises—L wants a dead bird to “re-seed song / in its throat”; M writes that “some years the dark is full of teeth.” In lines that seem emblematic of the whole, L writes, for his daughter besieged by illness, “I want to sing a song / that shatters her shaking, a psalm that sets her free.” There is sorrow in these exchanges, but there is also beauty, an uncompromising need for truth.
—Lynne Knight, author of The Language of Forgetting
In this remarkable collaborative book of meditations on family, illness, parenthood, and the fragility of living things, Johnson and Merchant have penned a polyvocal tome in language that pushes against the pain and replaces it with tender musical testaments: a beautiful duet that waltzes back and forth, page after page, “Churched with wings.”
—Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys
Luke Johnson and Megan Merchant have created a new treasure for readers of poetry. How wonderful it is to encounter a truly unique book—a weaving of two voices, two psyches, two ways of looking at the world, out of which has come this gorgeous wreath of poems. Open this book—with care, with tenderness—and find the many voices inside you speaking with one another, asking great questions, searching for truth in an endlessly lush dialectic, and loving the search.
—Joseph Fasano, author of The Last Song of The World
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.