The intimate and lyrical language of Amanda Merpaw’s Most of All the Wanting (Palimpsest Press, 2024) perfectly matches the themes of grief, upheaval, and desire explored in the collection. This is a book that guides you gently through the very act of surviving, with poems that consistently exhibit a mature and assured voice amidst uncertainty.
“Survive the world constantly / if not carefully // Survive the world persistently” offers Merpaw in “Notes Toward a Theory of Survival.” The repetition and special positioning of the words on the page is precise, building towards the bigger thematic arc of the collection. She picks up this thread in “Notes Towards a Theory of Otherwise,” describing how “J says survival is beyond language.” There’s a tension present between survival being bigger than poetry, but this narrative being expressed through poetry nonetheless suggests poetry is a part of survival.
Merpaw often uses these paired constructions to show the juxtaposition between the abstract and tangible to make the elusive aspects of “wanting” feel more real. In “Aubade in Yesterday’s Dress,” she writes, “Some languages surprise me / into longing. Some nights a clean cup / is enough.” The mirroring of the lyrical structure grounds the idea of longing into a household object, something that we can touch and hold.
Creating tension within language and poetry is what Merpaw excels at in Most of All the Wanting. To produce the effect of “wanting” alluded to in the title, Merpaw plays with being within and leaving the body. In the prose poem, “Cancelling the Future,” she writes, “I left my body to perch by the lake. Yes, the one that grows ghosts.” As she grounds back into the body in another prose poem, “Supermoon in Aquarius: An August Oracle,” she writes, “There’s no transit your body doesn’t know.”
While the book’s first half ruminates on grief, the second half amps up the desire. The slow, deliberate language is still present, as Merpaw writes lines like “Desire quiets / as much as it heightens” and “Tracing / pleasure is mine, I say, and all.” The language is, for the most part, serious, but there is humour present as well. “It’s hot to be divorced so young,” writes Merpaw in “The Communist’s Daughter,” a poem that contains the title of Merpaw’s first chapbook, Put the Ghosts Down Between Us.
The body as a movable and ghostly entity appears across the collection, even as Merpaw’s attention shifts. In poems that verge on speculative, she describes how “I’d rather be / on the moon, yes, right now, ancient and lofty and real.” She shifts into the forest too, as she “let[s] my skin ferment astride a crown of paper birches” and “show[s] you the forest / sprouting in my back teeth.”
The collection closes out with a sense of aliveness and vibrancy in “Summer Solstice” as the speaker proclaims, “Today I’m here. I echo / my echoing.” Most of All the Wanting is infused with tenderness, even as it tackles difficult moments of life. The reader shifts in and out of the body along with Merpaw, settling into a place of grace and kindness and love.
Bios
Manahil Bandukwala
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, ON. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award. Manahil was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
Palimpsest Press
Palimpsest Press publishes poetry, literary fiction, and non-fiction titles that deal with poetics, cultural criticism, and literary biography. We look for poetry that displays technical mastery, precise language, and an authentic voice, and fiction that is rich in imagery, well crafted, and focused on character development. Our non-fiction titles are essays or memoirs written by poets, and books that examine Canadian poetry and the Canadian cultural landscape.