Meridian is a collection of poems that reflects the poet's deep and abiding love affair with the natural world. The poems draw on the alchemy that binds the visible and the invisible, capturing moments with people, places, and things that cannot be reduced and therefore diminished. Written over a span of years, the poems reflect the author's ongoing fascination with things that can be perceived but neither measured nor explained in surface conceptions. The two pieces that bookend this collection feature a mysterious hum, and that thread traces its way through the collection as a whole: the early poems begin with abstract ideas about time and binary thinking, subsequently widening the frame to explore the poet's expansive sense of humankind and her engagement with nature. With an architect's eye, she shapes these poems to meet the varied contexts from which they arose, opening to us a vision of creation that seeks to engage readers with a sense of wonder and invite them into the spacious embrace of gratitude.
This chapbook was the winning selection for Wildhouse Poetry's "2023 'con/verge/nce' Chapbook Contest, judged by Jane Hirshfield. In selecting Meridian, Ms. Hirshfield wrote of this collection: "In Meridian, Julie Sumner offers readers a chapbook of quietly particular observations and tensile strengths. Body, speech, and mind are equally present, in poems that reference philosophy and photons, hold archeology and a patient's post-surgical staples, present a sly flash of the comic and an empathy extending to humans, vegetables, birds, and one almost-extinct monk seal looking back at those who marvel at its arrival. The ethics of interconnection inform each page, along with the wonder of transformation, both natural and human. In one poem, a glassblower's globe makes of its single, held human breath a world. Just so, these pages conjure and hold in hand, eyes, and ear the ranges of our human lives: our shapes, fates, forms, choices, pausings, ponderings; our borrowed feathers, our mysteries, our resilience."
-Jane Hirshfield