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SECRET WORK

SECRET WORK

$21.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9865715-8-4

Pub Date: Spring 2025

Pages: 68


By Meredith Mason


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2024


Secret Work speaks of hidden labor of all sorts, from the work of a wage-earner in a big box store, to the work of mothering as a single parent, to the work of introspection and writing poems, connecting to larger questions about the struggle to be in right relationship with one other and the natural world.


In Meredith Mason’s breathtaking collection Secret Work, work takes on a range of meanings. The work of mothering, the work of daughtering, retail work, poetic work. What unites these all is her clear, deep intellect, her remarkable imagination, and her ability to craft speakers that readers will follow anywhere whether it be to a talent show or a big box store’s break room. Anyone who reads these poems will quickly come to understand that Mason is one of the true talents of her generation.

—Jackson Holbert, Final Judge for the Idaho Prize 2024


    In Mason’s completely unassuming, unaffected poems, the work is secret, as in subtle, but also invisible, unacknowledged. It’s the work of a single mother, a secret poet, her unacknowledged legislation: the secret glow of her seeing, trials, worry, anger. Her reflections, depths, entanglements. The secret work of making do. No “new wood” that “smokes and suffers,” what suffices in Secret Work’s “seasoned pieces” is the abiding correspondence of language and sound, the unlikely swerves and turning—even in opposite directions—of verbal gears. It’s the work of the unsaid as much as of the said. It is a work of continual care and irony, of uncommonly humane humor, to countenance—in the face of waste, dissonance, inadequacy, and inequity—what Anne Carson calls metaphor’s true mistakes, each vessel, as Mason writes, “escaping / its shape.” This work isn’t secret because it wants to hide anything or court mystery. It isn’t quietude. It’s secret because the truth is shy.

    —Austin Segrest


    Meredith Mason lives and writes poems in a small Wisconsin city. Recent poems have appeared in Rattle, fsm, Peregrine, UpNorth Lit, and Rattle: Poets Respond. She works in the Public Services department of her local library and spends most of her time raising two sons. She is a graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

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