CHRISTYMERRY
ANNOUNCING BOOK RELEASE EVENT for Don't Kiss the Messenger!
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Reading & Q&A at Cosmic Coffee (3301 Central Ave. NE) on Saturday, November 16, 3 to 5 PM
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Click here for more details: Facebook event page
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Join Christy Merry in the trenches of love where joys, frustrations and despair accompany an arduous journey in her new collection, Don’t Kiss the Messenger. A few prologue poems introduce us to her seasons of love. Though “scarred, beautifically/by Love” she hopes others will still risk seeking it. “What you have at the end is anything but velveteen,” she writes of the magic she anticipates in long-term love, while navigating a world where “lovers are like knife-throwers.” Bridges get burned as she tries to build them. Surprises await the reader especially in her longest and final section (appropriately like a Minnesota winter) where “a faithful heart’s a burden.” Grief, loss, loneliness and the rest of what love leaves behind is not enough, Merry’s words tell us. Yet even as an unstrung rib, this lover will try again and “cheat despair.” Like me, you may want to read these poems more than once.
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​ - Charmaine Pappas Donovan,
Poet Laureate of the League of Minnesota Poets​
This book of poetry has distilled the experiences of love and loss wonderfully. How do we transform by joining in experience with another? How do we continue on when it ends? How do we build ourselves back up? How do we wait for a future that now feels unknowable and unfamiliar? How do we keep faith that we’ll get all that is meant for us in the end, and that the end will be anything but this pain? Merry viscerally captures the essence of these questions, and we are along for the journey through her seasons. Likely remembering our own journeys. Nodding along remembering, “Yes, yes. Exactly this.”
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- Lindsay Hutton Pierre, Former co-host of Book Narcs podcast
THE LATEST​​
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October 12, 2024 - A poem of mine, 'Next', won 3rd place in the Lake Country Journal poetry contest, and was published in their October/November issue! Read poem here.
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November 6, 2024 - Physical copies of Don't Kiss the Messenger will be available at Cosmic Coffee (3301 Central Ave NE) & online at Bandcamp.com​.
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November 9, 2024 - I'll be reading at the Novelty Collective Art & Music Fest at the Cove Art Center in Pittsburgh, PA - new book will be available at this reading as well! $5 Suggested Donation for festival entry. More details to come.​
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November 16, 2024 - Book release event at Cosmic Coffee (3301 Central Ave NE, Minneapolis), 3-5 pm on Saturday, free event! Greg Watson will be sharing some poems at the beginning of the event! More details TBA.
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December 7, 2024 - Mercy Vineyard's Holiday Market! 1-5 pm on Saturday, 752 Harding Street NE, Minneapolis, MN - I will be one of the vendors there, and will be selling all my books/CDs etc.
