Afterlife (forthcoming)

An essay on mortality, small- and large-scale collective making, the animate within the inanimate and the afterlives of materials through the mimetic medium of wax. Spilling across poetic thinking, candlemaking, the everyday, culture and ecology, and absorbing a wide range of references including Madame Tussauds, Europe’s biggest industrial candlemaking factory and the work of poets such as Louise Glück and Mary Ruefle, this lyric essay re-approaches this familiar but critically neglected biosynthetic material. Secreted and reconstituted from nonhuman bodies, in its flesh-like malleability wax also remains the closest reproductive medium we have of our bodies, blurring boundaries between life and death, the human and the non-human. Prioritising the materiality of wax and its environmental intersections as a focal point, while also considering wax as an amorphous, interstitial model for thought, Afterlife asks how we might conceptualise mortality as we become more collectively conscious of our environmental connectedness.

Featured in The New Yorker
Forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions

Emblem

Poetry Book Society Choice

Emblem is the debut collection from Lucy Mercer, winner of the inaugural White Review Poet’s Prize. Emblem revitalises this forgotten hybrid form in the present as a frame to contemplate the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior. In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato – a witness to a lonely time – the poems are carried forward by a non-linear dream logic of metaphor and similitude,speaking pictures who remain silent and a focus on an adjacent imaginal world. As well as reusing images from Alciato’s emblem book, the poems fixate on alternating relations between text and image that blur into relations between mind and body, child and mother, red and green, past and present, public and private, the living and the dead.

‘These are surreal, startling poems that shift our understanding of what language might be able to express.’
— Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian

‘Mercer presses upon language in such a way as to make it shimmer, or blink, or stagger. … It’s an enormously satisfying collection, each poem singing on its own and speaking to the others as they go.’
— Edwina Attlee, Poetry Review

‘Mercer’s Emblem is less interested in stable moral meanings... than in moments of uncertainty and unsettled perception... There is a Rorschach quality to these poems... Mercer follows the nudges of the unconscious wherever they lead, to thrilling effect.’
— Sarah Howe, the PBS Summer Bulletin


’Emblem is a rare book, full of strange, otherworldly poems that are imbued with wit and inventiveness... This is a brilliant debut collection by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing today in the UK.’
— Leo Boix, Magma


‘Through rigorous research into the emblematic form, Mercer has crafted a deeply considered and self-reflexive collection that is as close to critical theory as it is poetry... Emblem is a multi-dimensional masterpiece and offers profundity with every page.’
— Kate Simpson, PN Review

‘Mercer’s book delves deeply into the terrors and joys of single parenting. These wild, ‘alarming and brightly strange’ poems reveal motherhood to be an institution governed as much by not-knowing as by logic and transparent reasoning. The collection counterpoints the necessary labour and discipline of child-rearing and poem-making with the powerful forces of intuition, freedom, and obscurity... to guide us through unthinkable and strange terrain.’
— Eliza Tewson, Oxford Poetry


‘Emblem is a truly assured and exploratory space that boldly gifts us with nourishing obscurity. The collection resurrects what could be too easily dismissed as a quaint moralistic form and brings us back into the heart of its oddness.'
— Nasim Luczaj, Spam Zine

Book of The Year in Frieze, The New Statesman and The White Review
Featured on BBC 3’s The Verb
Published by Prototype in 2022.