BOOKS
Click here to order Catwalk, my new book of poems, released on June 23. Beautifully produced by Longship Press, and selected as a BEST INDIE BOOK 2020 by Kirkus Review. Here are the blurbs from the back cover:
In Catwalk, Meryl Natchez casts the kind of spells that amount to a more precise definition for the “changing same” of what lyric poetry really is. Yes, these poems show a gift for formal dexterity with haibuns and cinquains and nonce verse, but what I love about them is how much of the world—how much of a life—Natchez conjures in the space of a few lines. From the biology of earthworms to the pitfalls of a forty-year love affair, there is no place this poetry won’t touch. Or in Natchez’s own words: “It wakes me with its/interrogating light.” This is a brilliant book. — Jericho Brown
The world of Meryl Natchez’s Catwalk reveals an elemental understanding of our place in the often conflicting dramas of the natural world and human impulses. There is an enviable muscle to these lyrical meditations on the ephemeral consolations of memory amid our ever-shifting, complex constellations of loss. — David St. John
Out of the ordinary, daily, material items of life, “newspaper or book or laptop, the ramekin of salt,” Meryl Natchez’s new book, Catwalk, forges a tapestry… As she writes, “now being a confused elixir/of sun and fog and email…/random moments that can converge/into a ravishing pattern…” It is that pattern that a reader finds in Catwalk. —Lynn Emanuel
Reviews
Kirkus Review
“Outstanding poetic musings that strike at the very core of human connections and contradictions.”
The Widening Spell
“My reading of Meryl Natchez’ Catwalk (Longship Press, 2020) has caused me to fall in love with poetry all over again.” Terry Lucas
Sorrow as a Matter of Perspective
Catwalk sings of life’s disappointments and consolations and reminds us that sorrow is a matter of perspective that tends to dwindle in the long rearview.” Rebecca Foust, ZYZZYVA
A Certain Uncertainty
“A skilled and versatile poet, Natchez works with ease within a variety of poetic forms and modes.” Maurya Simon, Poetry Northwest
Poems from the Stray Dog Café:
Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Gumilev
Translated by Meryl Natchez with Polina Barskova and Boris Wolfson
Includes an introduction describing the Acmeist poetic movement, a timeline, and an updated translation of “The Morning of Acmeism,” by Osip Mandelstam, as well as selected poems. Second printing. Email larry.mrbebop@gmail.com to purchase.
Jade Suit, Poems
Hardcover, 2001
hit & run press, Berkeley, California.
Email larry.mrbebop@gmail.com to purchase.
Tadeusz Borowksi: Selected Poems
Translated by Tadeusz Pioro, Larry Rafferty and Meryl Natchez, introduction by Stanisław Barańczak
Most of these poems were written while Borowski was a prisoner in Dachau, Birkenau and Auschwitz, during World War II. Borowski and other inmates memorized them and he reassembled them after the war.
hit & run press, Berkeley, California.
Email larry.mrbebop@gmail.com to purchase.
Poetry Publications (online)
A Single Bending Leaf
Terrain
The Muses as Flamingos
Indolent Books
The Afternoon Before the Day of Atonement
JWeekly
Because I woke in a panic
Rogue Agent
Shelter in Place
What Rough Beast
Art and Matvei Petrovich Bronstien
(Finalist, Joan Swift Memorial Prize)
PoetryNorthwest
Theodicy
Women’s Voices for Change
Thinking about Einstein while waiting for the Big Blue Bus
The American Journal of Poetry
Made of Molecules and More About the Oak
Rappahonnock Review
Dawn in Monterey
Canary Lit Mag
Marai Sandor in San Diego
Winning Writers
Poem with a Line by Amy Clampitt
talkingwriting.com
Equivocal Activist
sixfold.org
Because I woke in a panic
RogueAgent
Lying on the massage table at the mudbaths
Literary Matters
Full Circle, a Diptych
Literary Matters
Spoken Poetry
voetica.com
Prose Publications (online)
A Career Called Poet (memoir)
Harvard Advocate Blog
Interview with Robert Hass, Sharon Olds & Brenda Hillman
for launch of Why to These Rocks” 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers
ZYZZYVA
Interview with Rebecca Foust
ZYZZYVA
Interview with Ellen Bass
Poetry Northwest
Interview with Dorianne Laux, March 2019
Poetry Northwest
Interview with Forrest Gander
Poetry Northwest
Interview with William Brewer
ZYZZYVA
Interview with Maurya Simon
Poetry Flash
Interview with Joyce Jenkins
ZYZZYVA
Book Reviews
An Ordinary Live by B.H.Fairchild
Tupelo Quarterly
Coral Bracho translated by Forrest Gander
ZYZZYVA
Amanda Moore, Requeening
Tupelo Quarterly
Katie Kitamura, Intimacies
ZYZZYVA
Forrest Gander, Twice Alive
LA Review of Books
Diane Seuss, frank:sonnets
Rain Taxi
Heather Altfeld, Post Mortem
ZYZZYA
The Selected Letters of John Berryman
Hudson Review, Winter 2021
Mark Jarman, Dailiness
ZYZZYVA
Ellen Bass, Indigo
LA Review of Books
Jericho Brown, The Tradition
ZYZZYVA
Jane Hirshfield, Ledger
ZYZZYVA
Dorianne Laux, Only as the Day Is Long
PoetryFlash
Francesca Bell, Bright Stain
ZYZZYVA
A. E. Stallings, LIKE
ZYZZYVA
Forrest Gander, Be With
ZYZZYVA
Tony Hoagland, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God
ZYZZYVA
Tony Hoagland, Recent Changes in the Vernacular
ZYZZYVA
In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide (Anthology from McSweeney’s)
ZYZZYVA
Mary Ruefle, My Private Property
ZYZZYVA
Troy Jollimore, Syllabus of Errors
ZYZZYVA
Interview
Rappahannock Review
Contributor Spotlight
Issue 5.3
2018 Project
Prose poems inspired by Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
More about the oak
It dominates the view its branches so inviting that the first thing we did was make a treehouse inside them not worried about the oak not thinking about the way each leathery leaf turns air and sunlight and water into food and draws another nanometer of water up through the channel of xylem from roots so deep that the trunk becomes a great reservoir and during the eight dry months of a California spring and summer and fall lets gravity pull some of its aquifer back to nourish the shallow roots around it, not considering the network of rhizomes this small ecosystem of hillside where we’d plunked ourselves, not really seeing the oak at all except as ornament, as tool for our human pleasure and it tolerates us still as the treehouse falls into disuse and the squirrels and crows the sentinel hummingbirds survey their territory from its branches as the small humans who played there move on
2019 Project
Looseplex
Work in progress.
Cut up sonnets inspired by Jericho Brown’s essay on the Duplex.
Read all about it in this PDF or watch Looseplex on the video page.
Looseplex 31-Losing Patience
How many years was my path obscured by junk
My ungovernable heart, pocked with grievance?
Microorganisms effervesce
Starting from something simple, like milk
Push up bras, slim jims, and cheese doodles
Endlessly stitching snags in the sky.
Remember being crazed with desire?
Seeds release in heat, the ground charred clear for them.
We talk after dinner, wine glasses refilled.
The monks who touched the match to their own dowsed robes,
What I believed was the absolute truth, no
The fluorescent, merciless present.
The earth gearing up to shrug us off.
These are the stamps on the final envelope.
A reading and conversation with Jane Hirshfield sponsored by Osher Marin JCC and Marin Poetry Center. This video unfortunately doesn’t start at the beginning, but about half of our hour together: 
Osher
