How do we speak what feels unspeakable?

Exploring the landscape of grief in the wake of divorce, Most of All the Wanting is a treatise on intimacy in the face of change. Throughout, Amanda Merpaw’s poems attend to the fluidity of queer desire, documenting the complexities of intimacy, longing, and joy where “there’s burning beyond / the cusp of our cups.” Set in an environment of political and ecological upheaval, Most of All the Wanting asks what queerness makes possible within the self and the world. An essential debut.

Amanda Merpaw (she/her) is a writer, editor, and educator. She is the author of the chapbook Put the Ghosts Down Between Us (2021), and her poetry, playwriting, and nonfiction have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, carte blanche, CV2, Grain, Prairie Fire, Plenitude, with Playwrights Canada Press, and elsewhere. Amanda was a finalist for Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2022 Poem of the Year Contest. She is currently a contributing editor at Arc Poetry Magazine and a member of the editorial board at Anstruther Press. Most of All the Wanting is her first full-length collection.

Amanda Merpaw's profile page

Situated in the wake of ended relationships or poised in the thrilling world of newfound desires, Amanda Merpaw’s poems are attuned to the pains and transformations of love and identity. “I write to you from the other side / of my body,” she asserts in a poem of characteristic grace and clarity. In Most of All the Wanting, her lustrous debut, we encounter the pleasurable intimacy of detail and the raw precision of feeling.

Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Loversn, author of Surrender & Resistance