"Midsummer Night's Toast is a book of relentless, headlong energy. These skillful and fiery poems, trapped between reverence for literary tradition and immense cynicism, stake out a wild and granular territory (one poem, for example, is titled "When my husband slides a record from Barbra Streisand's sleeve and it's actually The Best of Aerosmith"). These poems delve into tip work, into the service economy, into the endless scroll, into "the earnest century where you got paid per word"; they subvert our expectations of what is immediate, what is remote, what is familiar, what can never be pinned down. "[ T]hey don't know about the poetry," the speaker announces to the reader, "how it sometimes makes things worse."" Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing
"Mamie Morgan toasts the truths of two lives rebuilt: a husband, ex-military, learning how to draw; a wife, post-breakdown, figuring out what happiness might be. Keeping them company are two rescue dogs named Retta and Wednesday, too much spaghetti at a place up the road, old crushes, bounced checks, punk shows in windowless rooms-and the pasts they lug around and try not to forget, try not to get dragged down by. This is an American litany of life as it is lived, a funny, fist-pumping assertion of the human in the face of our tenebrous, tech-chilled present." - Walt Hunter, author of Some Flowers
"Painstakingly crafted, you will feel held by the most intimate and hilarious vulnerabilities of your being as you travel a variety of memory worlds, line to line, with Mamie Morgan. Her poems reveal how the downright mean and careless ways we can interact with one another are embedded in our psyches, following us as we try to go about the business of living. We are called to remember and worship the wreckage we have traversed, which makes possible our personal joys and beauty. These poems recall every terrible job, house party, microaggression, and lovers quarrel you left behind for a peace you did not know you needed. Here is medicine for the spirit they tried to tame. Here is how we make a home from what was broken. Rich with unflinching honesty and a reverence for the mundane and overlooked, here is how we care for and celebrate the wild ride that is our own." Marlanda Dekine, author of Thresh and Hold
