* Selected for 2016 American Library Association Over the Rainbow List Song is mysterious. It seems to arise when the separation between sophistication and simplicity has been submerged in deep water. Song is that ringing-out of the wrung heart whereby what is personal becomes what is universal—and so it is fitting that all the archetypal seasons in Mary Meriam’s Girlie Calendar have their own specific songs to share, their own ardent delights. Yet these delights are hard-fought, because song is also that inspiring moment of transcendence so in evidence in the courage of these lines: "A knife of pain may bend you over double, / but hover, swing from your trapeze, breathe." Mary Meriam’s songs are thus both breath-taking and breath-giving. Indeed, there is a rigor of architecture in these poems, as well as in the construction of the book as a whole, that is exacting, deliberate, astonishingly disciplined—and yet surrendering to such songs, as a reader, seems as natural as breathing. "Let steel become a sigh," she sings to herself in her month of August. Those five words rise and fall as an exquisitely fragile monument to all song. I would even go so far as to say that they are a powerful medicine for what ails us.

• R. Nemo Hill