Northwood

September 15, 2018
A damaged young woman attempts to rebuild her life after a near-deadly affair in this eerie fable. The speaker of Meijer's novella in poems is an artist lost inside her own wilderness. "I drew you as I used to draw myself, at first to make / more of you, later to get rid of you, and now I don't draw you / at all," she thinks as she attempts to unravel a destructive affair. Years later, she remains haunted by the woods where she once seduced a wolf with "jade eyes" and "silver hair, older than any man I'd ever thought was / beautiful." Even after she returns to the city, resumes her teaching job, and marries "a man...who takes pity on things, whose pity / leads him to love," the speaker receives dream phone calls that contain leaves rustling in the wind or erotic commands that call her back to the wild. Meijer (Heartbreaker, 2016) is an expert at worldbuilding, and the narrative she spins is fractured across fairy tale, mythology, and the occult. Broken into lines, the story becomes even more propulsive and strange--we don't get entire scenes but moments on either side of a blackout or brief glimpses into the speaker's indelible fear of losing herself to lust and violence. Like Anne Carson or Maggie Nelson, Meijer creates her own genre, somewhere between poetry and prose, myth and reality. While Meijer is sometimes stronger at creating an overall effect than at landing individual lines, the result is still memorable, strange, and haunting.Fans of Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Kate Bernheimer will find much to love in Meijer's haunted woods.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 24, 2018
Meijer (Heartbreaker) follows an overwhelming affair and its long reach in this evocative work, constructed as a blend of poems and brief, disconnected snippets. An unnamed woman has rented a rural cabin to escape the city and produce art for a year. At a dance, she meets a much older married man and they begin a passionate affair that tips from rough into abusive. The narrator draws on classical mythology and fairy tales to explain her infatuation despite its violence and terror. After her return to the city, she copes with her mother’s cancer treatment and attempts to return to a normal life, including marrying another man. The man from the dance, however, continues to float around the margins of her life, calling her at times of desire and crisis, including after the death of his daughter. The unfinished texture of their affair and the woman’s uncertain processing of her trauma shapes her life without providing a firm conclusion. Passages crackle with breathtakingly fresh images such as the couple erotically tasting her inks, and lines such as “it did not drain the pus from the panic when I heard you leave.” This challenging but beautiful work will compel readers to fit together the pieces of the protagonist’s lingering trauma.