Press Release: Maya Janson
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Blue Edge Books bluedgebooks@gmail.com
Poems Ponder Fleeting, Confounding, Mysterious Nature of Life
SANTA FE—Maya Janson had been trying for nearly five years to publish her second poetry collection, when she got a fortuitous email “out of the blue.”
“The manuscript was rejected from every place I’d sent it,” Janson explains. “It had not been a finalist nor semi-finalist, nary a nibble or an encouraging response. I was feeling completely out of ideas for where to send it next, thinking the poems failed and the collection destined for the desk drawer. Then, out of the blue I got a message from Kathleen asking to read the manuscript! It was an unexpected happy ending/beginning.”
Fast forward and now Janson’s second poetry collection, On the Mercy Me Planet, is the inaugural publication of Blue Edge Books, a Santa Fe small press that writer-editor Kathleen Lee founded in 2022. The goal is simple: to publish good poetry.
“I started the press because I know so many good writers who haven’t been able to get their manuscripts published,” Lee says. “I regard Blue Edge Books as a way to contribute something tangible to the literary arts community.”
Janson’s forty-nine poems in On the Mercy Me Planet are more than good poetry. Her work is surprising, playful, understated, magnanimous, astute.
In poems like “In this Life” and “Unquantifiable, But Still We Count Them” Janson explores the expected and unexpected in grief, toying with the task of enumerating loss. “Aspirational Mode” and other poems portray the artist as she aspires to be—calmer, softer, more present—and how human she is: “one foot in the mud the other in glory,” Janson writes, vacillating between fury and hope.
The delight is in the details: What do you do when your neighbor loses a family member? Should you climb the fence with a casserole, or walk through the gate? Janson’s poems, while at times personal and intimate, ask large questions such as how and what do we remember? She ponders the duality of life, which can be both traumatic and triumphant. She shows how we understand life’s complexities and yet know nothing. Each poem is a rumination on a scene, memory, thought, or feeling where the poet peels back the veil on how simple it all is, and how mysterious. Her poems show that our memories work as a mirror of life’s mysteries.
Despite death and loss and injury and breakups, short-lists, diagnoses, and climate change, in Janson’s poems the sea still laps against the shore, the rower still goes in, out, and back in again. If readers could choose one line to take away, here’s one from Janson's poem “Spin Cycle:” “Find the way then lose the way. Repeat.”
On the Mercy Me Planet is available at bookstores, on Amazon at , and online at Itasca Books. To schedule an author interview or reading, CONTACT: bluedgebooks@gmail.com.
On the Mercy Me Planet, by Maya Janson
Published by Blue Edge Books
$16 paperback
978-8-9854357-0-2
Publication: April 29, 2022
Locale: Northampton, Massachusetts, U.S.A.