Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed

Merryn Rutledge’s compelling voice places us in a luminous yet unsettled and unsettling world in poems that insist we listen as well as look, touch as well as taste. Devotion to a world-that-is combines with humor at its quirks, hope for its amazements, delight in its pleasures. Who among us could find serendipity, even wonder, in cleaning a dishwasher filter? Perform the difficult work of painful remembrance while finding grace? As the poems “heave into memory,” they challenge us to plumb dire loss and find redemptive awe. Disturbing readers in the best ways, the book both gives us pause and lets us pause, connecting the ordinary to the extraordinary, the mundane to the sublime.

-Karen Kilcup, Elizabeth Rosenthal Professor, University of North Carolina Greensboro, winner of the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize

Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed startles the reader into wakefulness. Deceptively simple, sometimes pastoral, this courageous book consistently chooses honesty over sentiment. In doing so, it builds trust, invites companionship. Unafraid of grief, deeply caring, never jaded, the poems are raw and tender. In “A Northerner Faces East” she writes:

What millions of breaths have I
not noticed, my brother whispered
just before his last one.

Her husband’s death, her rural southern childhood, simple joys, terrible loss-all are shared with generosity. We are offered a glimpse of what it might be to live together bravely.

-Scudder Parker, author, Safe as Lightning

The imagery in this beautiful collection is dense and original as the poet depicts vividly recalled childhood experience and fresh, daily views of the natural world. But the poet does not stop there, nor shirk from the hardest experiences in her own life-a disabling and furious grief, the wrongs of racism, and homelessness expressed in tangible form. The book is crunchy with memorable phrases, and its images will haunt you.

-Mary Dingee Fillmore, author, An Address in Amsterdam