Overview

How do we remember the dead in a world filled with the ephemeral? In her debut poetry collection, Her Names, Her Wits, Danika Paige Myers explores the ""backwards magic"" of memory. Inspired by her young daughter's curiosity about death, Myers transforms mourning and memory into mending, stitching together domestic life with the rituals of the cemetery. Spanning from the windswept Oregon coast to the industrial ruins of Oella Mill near Baltimore, Maryland, these poems fit together like a handmade quilt. Myers pieces together found names and historical research, turning forgotten headstones into rhythmic chants. Family stories are retold in new lyric forms while the muse, Clotho, presides over the scene, spinning out threads of life and language. Beyond personal memory and loss, the collection confronts the environmental legacy of the 21st century. Myers examines the cemetery not just as a place of rest, but as a contested urban green space-a sanctuary for cicadas, deer, and geese that defies modern development and plastic waste. Why read Her Names, Her Wits? For fans of contemporary poetry, the collection offers a fresh voice exploring motherhood, ancestry, and reflection on what cemeteries represent in our modern landscape. Her Names, Her Wits is a profound exploration of what grows from the bones of the past and how we hold the names that define us.

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Reviews

Myers stitches a portrait of family animated by her young daughter's fascination with cemeteries-places to play with interesting names. In gorgeous lyric moments, Myers renders these plots of land as patches of earth that-like patches on clothing, like families-attempt to hold the evanescent lives of humans, an endeavor that is at once ""the substance of a life"" and must fail: ""things that wear / away laid over things / that wear away."" A chorus of names from gravestones threads through this work, evoking in song the mystery of what it means to be a self, to be called something on earth. -Allison Cobb, author of Green-Wood and Plastic: an Autobiography As a child runs eagerly amongst headstones, so a poet is gifted songs from inside the carved names. With a sensibility reminiscent of Lorine Niedecker, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe, Danika Myers teases song from story. Reading Her Names, Her Wits allowed me to experience the powerful distance and proximity that poetry can simultaneously afford. Here, surely, is a debut to read again and again. -Sally Keith, author of Two of Everything and River House

Author Information

Danika Paige Myers' poems have appeared in journals including Nelle, Fairy Tale Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Harlot: a journal of the arts of persuasion. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and a winner of the Editor's Prize for Poetry from Meridian. Danika earned an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from George Mason University and is an Assistant Professor of Writing (Teaching) at The George Washington University in Washington DC. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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