The Miraculous, Sometimes
The Miraculous, Sometimes
The Miraculous, Sometimes
By Meg Shevenock
March 25, 2020 • 6 x 9 • x 120 pages • 978-1-7336020-3-7
“I would fashion my existence of debris” is Meg Shevenock’s apt take on her work: to find value in that which is thought to have none, even trauma. While a live wire of harm and confusion powerfully hums here, the real accomplishment of this book is its intimacy, the degree to which I was allowed to experience a mind creating pattern and sense. I don’t know how to put this—there was almost a double haunting: I became a ghost inside her way of thinking as it came to haunt me. I can’t recall being more movingly reminded that consciousness is an embrace, that what we create is a confession of affection. Here, more than wounds, than breaks, their wake and what can be made of it is loved: “I have defined the day by what I make or not.” Rooted in pain and complexity, The Miraculous, Sometimes is a beautiful meditation on the experience and purpose of art, a demonstration that we live our aesthetics.
—Bob Hicok, final judge
Meg Shevenock
Meg Shevenock has worked with gifted students through an approach of associative learning for the past eleven years. More recently, she has been the “reader” for the artist Ann Hamilton. Meg’s poems and essays have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Lana Turner, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, jubilat, Kenyon Review blog, and elsewhere. She maintains an ongoing telepathic art practice with her collaborator Jamie Boyle. Meg lives in Columbus, Ohio.