View from a Borrowed Field by Meghan Sterling(Paul Nemser Award Winner)

Praise for View from a Borrowed Field

After reading, I am still standing in a field, wading thick in an unflinching world of longing beside Meghan Sterling; her poems leaving echoes of lupines, snow, sky, lust, loss, dreams, and a quiet desperation that we are mostly too scared to put into words. In View From a Borrowed Field, Sterling is a vessel of blue, a passionate flower bud on a branch tip encased in ice. She is a mother with her whole body shielding her daughter from pandemic, from ghost-guns, from a breaking world. I found myself breathless with a mad love for a small child I do not know, wild soft petal blooming in these pages. “I have desired like that every day of my life, with all of my cells sprung and solitary as if I lived in the center of the moon… I have lost myself in love for her and it is good.” Through the beauty and tragedy of these poems, the mirror of their ache and wonder, “the buds have forced their faces out of the stems into bright yellow fans and gold clusters…like an explosion of delicate sex in the woods.” The borrowed field becomes, finally, home. 
– Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan

About the Author

Multi-Pushcart Nominee, Meghan Sterling has been published or has work forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Colorado Review and many others. Her first full length collection These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021 and was an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry. Her chapbook, Self Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) will be out in 2023.  Her full-length collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) will also be coming out in 2023. She is the Program Director at Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and lives in Maine with her family. Read her work at meghansterling.com.