Praise for Sick Letters from the Lovebed

In “Sick Letters from the Lovebed,” Meghan Sterling’s frank, lyrical chapbook, the poet explores the vagaries of midlife, the “erasures” and transformations that time wreaks.

Epistolary poems are interspersed throughout the manuscript— to family members, to physical and emotional states, to intangibles—and are bookended by poems that are letters to the body. In the first of those, the poet likens old selves to ghost-like “sisters.” We come to meet several of these spectral identities in poems centered on relationships with the mother, the beloved, children, and the changing self.

Sterling wields precise and novel images (“The moon is glowering like a crumpled can...the backyard pool a bright blue mouth...”). Poems on chronic illness, fraught relationships, and loss contain unexpected metaphors and insights that bathe even the most trying circumstances in a kind of beauty.

The book begins with a poem of grief and concludes with ones that promise acceptance; the span between them proves a compelling journey for the reader. “Sick Letters from the Lovebed,” is unflinching, wise, and generous, and the strong light it casts is a warm one.

—Marjorie Tesser, Editor of Mom Egg Review (MER) and author of Unquiet (forthcoming)

In Meghan Sterling's book of poems, Sick Letters from the Lovebed, the reader is immersed in the experience of the  body failing—  naming illness as owl, as sea, as nature. The speaker searches for how to connect to her family, her daughter, her husband; what’s left when we’re haunted by all we’ve inherited and the illness consuming us? These poems will ask you to sit in stillness, to listen and reimagine the body that was, that is, & will be.  

—Minadora Macharet, author of Love Me, Anyway  

Reading Sick Letters from the Love Bed feels like lying in a summer field, staring at the sky, and talking to your best friend about everything from the granular experiences of bodily demise to the expansiveness of hope, love, death, and despair. Sterling’s collection invites gritty contemplation that exists both inside and outside the self in this collection, with perspectives in the poems simultaneously embodied and externalized, as though the reader is peering into and out of the poems from multiple vantage points. I gasped when I read the lines “Selves, my sisters, rising to the water’s skin / like the ghost of someone drowned,” deliciously haunting examples of this refraction. 

These poems sing along the cusp of living destruction—the body threatening to split, drown, suffocate, vanish, rupture, and intimacy and relationship emerge as both the dagger and the balm to the liminal space created in this looming fracture. Sterling writes, “I listened for waves, / but it was my rhythmic choking rushing the shore / of my body. Even so, there is romance in this.” This collection leads the reader through a romance in the earth-bound and bodily, through the music in demise, and all the strange delight in what is complicated about the limited human body and the limitless human experience. 

—Megan Leonard, author of Larkspur Queen and book of lullabies