Merrill Oliver Douglas's first full length poetry collection, Persephone Heads For the Gate, won the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, SWWIM Every Day and Whale Road Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York.

Other poems on the web by Merrill Oliver Douglas :
"I Want"
"Another Poem About Menstruation"
"Putting Clothes Away"
"Beyond"
"When He Strolled the Mall"
Three poems
"Home"
"Summer, in My Early Twenties"
"Seeks Its Own Level"

About Persephone Heads For the Gate:

"Not dependent on a first-person 'I', the poems in Persephone Heads for the Gate move the reader's focus from quotidian detail to big idea with confidence. Attuned to the musical quality of language, these poems invite you to read them aloud to enjoy their mouthfeel and sonic quality. This poet creates fresh, engaging imagery that holds tension between beauty and harsh truths."
—Ellen Bass

"The tender attention with which Merrill Douglas holds the things of this world is breathtaking: 'small brown birds/going chink, chink like coins in the ivy,' 'sun licks billows/of garlicky lamb smoke/that roll above street fair earrings,' a toasted marshmallow that 'flakes on my tongue with the taste of charred news,' or 'the sound my grown body releases/now when I unfasten my bra.' It is a deep and moving pleasure to spend time in the world of these poems, poems that suggest, no, insist that to live is to 'immerse your face in mud and then arise...,' to 'pinch together thumb and index finger to tweeze/unending filaments of joy from the air....'"
—Marilyn McCabe