Jeredith Merrin--brought up in the Pacific Northwest--took her MA in English (specializing in Chaucer), and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Anglo-American Poetry and Poetics. CUP, a special honoree in the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, is her third collection; her previous books are Shift and Bat Ode (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poets series). She's authored an influential book of criticism on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her reviews and essays (on Moore, Bishop, Clare, Mew, Amichai, and others), and poems have appeared in Paris Review, Slate, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. A retired Professor of English (The Ohio State University), she lives near Phoenix.
Here is a collection of poetry that one must read, reread and on and on. Its memories captured are both of a personal past and a mythic one in which we are daughters hurt, mothers hurting, Cain and Abel, young and old. With its striking metaphors--"The Big roar" of life's waves, or its turns of phrase, "laughing, for dear life," or her imagining herself into dark areas and possible death, Merrin comes out on the other side where her "Cup" runneth over! Katherine H. Burkman
