Praise for Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora:

In Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora, Meghan Sterling sees deeply beneath the surfaces of things.  These resonant poems take her on a journey—where she investigates the past that shaped and continues to shape who she is now. Her evocative and precise language allows us to experience the depth of complex connections between generations. She weaves love and loss together in a way that makes us alive in every moment.

—Stuart Kestenbaum, author of Pilgrimage

The music of Meghan Sterling’s lines in Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora compellingly marries memory and terror in ways both haunting and unforgettable. Sterling warns her readers in the eponymously-titled poem that “discomfort” is her—and thus, our—guide, while she also comforts us by asserting that, notwithstanding all that has passed, in the end we’re still here “like a crack of light shining across the floor in a dark room.” This is a necessary collection to be read, and then read again.

—Lynne Thompson, author of Fretwork

What gentle poems of apocalypse these are. Meghan Sterling’s Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora is a collection written from the eye of the storm, looking back on devastations survived, while seeing clearly the devastations that are coming. If anyone asks what it was like to be a Jew in these United States of America in this first part of the twenty-first century, hand them this collection, and tell them that it was to know that love and care have always carried us forward, because no danger is ever truly behind us. 

—Jason Schneiderman, author of Hold Me Tight