Ghost: : Seeds: Poems - Paperback

by Sebastian Merrill (Author)

2024 Stonewall Book Award - Barbara Gittings Literature Award Honor Book
2024 Mass Book Awards Poetry Longlist
2023 Boston Authors Club Julia Ward Howe Awards Notable Book
Winner of The 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn

Set on a remote island on the Maine coast, GHOST:: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a trans speaker and his "ghost," the "girl-ghost" of the self that he left behind to become the man he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave. Alternating between prose-like elements and lyric meditations, the book's expansive form makes full use of the page from margin to margin, creating space and breathing room for complicated investigations of memory, gender, and grief.

...
From "Remember the first time"

Remember the first time we realized
we could choose our own name?

The name that would become my name?

In college, we played with gender in the theater,
acted as Sebastian in Twelfth Night.

One night, after rehearsal, we told our friends,

Call me Sebastian, even when I'm not on the stage.

Over ten years since we found my name,
I'm still learning myself:

I grow my hair long for the first time
since I abandoned you.

Author Biography

SEBASTIAN MERRILL's debut collection GHOST:: SEEDS was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of The 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. The winner of the 2022 Levis Prize for Poetry from Friends of Writers, Sebastian was selected as a member of the 2023 Get the Word Out inaugural poetry cohort for debut writers from Poets & Writers. A staff-scholar for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2022 and 2023 and the Summer 2023 Warren Wilson MFA Alumni Residency Fellow, Sebastian has also received support from Tin House Workshop and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. The recipient of the Rodney Jack Scholarship from Friends of Writers, he holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and a BA from Wellesley College.