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Praise for Hallucinating a Homestead (Winner of the 2020 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize judged by Traci Brimhall):
Hallucinating a Homestead is astonishing. From its first urgent poem through all the formally playful and surreal poems thereafter, this collection surprises at every turn. Both abundant and elliptical, these poems have all the hallmarks of a fairytale, but more than one wolf and witch resides here. Griffitts’ amplitude suffuses every line with surreal images and darkly joyful leaps into a hundred unknowns. Here, where "body becomes word," the mouth is a weapon of both attack and defense. Pain is a raw material waiting to be used, waiting to be spun into something transformed, something that can be held, and maybe even forgiven. — Traci Brimhall, Contest Judge and author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod and Saudade
The poems in Hallucinating a Homestead are the megafauna of the poetry landscape, altering the air around them. Each one brims with the startling and the sensuous, from “a stone fruit in the mouth of a doe” to “the dark hours of my stockings.” Ferociously unapologetic for their ferocious femininity, these poems by Meg Griffitts muscle their way into the muscle of your heart. — Cecily Parks, author of O’Nights and Field Folly Snow
Hallucinating a Homestead is astonishing. From its first urgent poem through all the formally playful and surreal poems thereafter, this collection surprises at every turn. Both abundant and elliptical, these poems have all the hallmarks of a fairytale, but more than one wolf and witch resides here. Griffitts’ amplitude suffuses every line with surreal images and darkly joyful leaps into a hundred unknowns. Here, where "body becomes word," the mouth is a weapon of both attack and defense. Pain is a raw material waiting to be used, waiting to be spun into something transformed, something that can be held, and maybe even forgiven. — Traci Brimhall, Contest Judge and author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod and Saudade
The poems in Hallucinating a Homestead are the megafauna of the poetry landscape, altering the air around them. Each one brims with the startling and the sensuous, from “a stone fruit in the mouth of a doe” to “the dark hours of my stockings.” Ferociously unapologetic for their ferocious femininity, these poems by Meg Griffitts muscle their way into the muscle of your heart. — Cecily Parks, author of O’Nights and Field Folly Snow
Sample Poem:
When I Was a Wetland
breathe into my teeth
like you’re making a creature
made of ribbonweed and rustling seams
finger the dark hours of my stockings
early bloomer lamb-limbs hesitating
in conversation with tall grasses
search for the clues that lay lush & low
beyond the certainty of land and water
I offer soft rushing & armfuls of rye
baby-blue moss shimmies up thigh backs
we pick its mystery apart
some new revelation floods my knuckles
oh, peregrinate I always do this abiding in river red
as if a common reed or stray horse
trying to reach past a meadow without violence:
that first-time feeling of being knee-deep
in water wearing all my clothes--
I laughed
into your mouth
When I Was a Wetland
breathe into my teeth
like you’re making a creature
made of ribbonweed and rustling seams
finger the dark hours of my stockings
early bloomer lamb-limbs hesitating
in conversation with tall grasses
search for the clues that lay lush & low
beyond the certainty of land and water
I offer soft rushing & armfuls of rye
baby-blue moss shimmies up thigh backs
we pick its mystery apart
some new revelation floods my knuckles
oh, peregrinate I always do this abiding in river red
as if a common reed or stray horse
trying to reach past a meadow without violence:
that first-time feeling of being knee-deep
in water wearing all my clothes--
I laughed
into your mouth
