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