The poems in Marianne Broyles' fierce and daring Liquid Mercury Girl rise to meet the challenges of our broken world head-on. With elegance, grace, and an unwavering poetic eye, Broyles meditates on the larger issues of love and loss, death and life, while also taking time to note the trill of a warbler's song. By turns witty and startling, lyrical and heart wrenching, these are poems that arrest, that force the reader to stand still and take heed. Liquid Mercury Girl is a balm for these times, a healing gift that allows us to recognize that the fractures in our world, and in ourselves, are wounds that can and must be healed with close attention, patience, and love. It is vital, necessary work--a calling to care for others, and ourselves, before it is too late. --Stacey Lynn Brown, author of The Shallows
Marianne Broyle's beautiful collection Liquid Mercury Girl centers around love that both liberates and aches, offering the imperative to love, always, for despite the pain it may bring, there is also hope. These poems illuminate struggles with mental illness and trauma from the caregiver's perspective, with compassion and empathy; they delve into the depths of girlhood memories such as the first kiss and summer camp, with wit and a deeper understanding of the trials that have made the speaker who she is, a wise and loving woman who is stronger for the pain she endured. These poems weave grief and joy with a deft thread, and implore of us, Love now, love now, love now. -Jenn Givhan, author of Rosa's Einstein
In Marianne Broyles' Liquid Mercury Girl we learn to love in loneliness, turn the pages of the bible and find our fathers instead, see the faces of our ancestors in our mother's troubled face, "trying to rise like a hyacinth in our] throat s]." This is a lovely collection where the voice yearns, sings, and mourns the way one does when one has lived just long enough to know both passion death intimately. Broyles tells us she "wanted her to hurt as much as I hurt/for knowing she was going to leave me, leave us, very soon, probably before the first hard frost in Connecticut." Broyles language cuts us deep, in fact, to the bone. But it is there, where her poems live, that we are able to see ourselves, and our aching, human lives for what they are; beautiful. --Erika T. Wurth, author of You Who Enter Here