Shortlisted for the ReLit Award for Poetry.

A wide-ranging meditation by an accomplished poet on the uncontainable materiality of the world.

From yoghurt tubs to pop-up books to bobcats, from cement trucks to lost socks to the products of conception, Meditatio Placentae, Monty Reid’s twelfth collection, is a book about unruly stuff. Stuff that functions but also stuff that exceeds, stuff that dreams. A gathering of short poems wrapped into longer sequences, this is a book that pays attention to the world, in all its dizzying forms.

The poems in Meditatio Placentae cluster around certain ideas, experiences, narratives; sometimes they cohere, sometimes they only assemble, but they are always at crossroads where people and objects collide. In these poems matter itself—including the placenta of the title poem—is vibrant, and argues for its rightful recognition.

When the time comes, the broken water disappears
into the seam of itself, and then the carry-on full of small bones

articulated as an I will also disappear.
They will be expecting me then.

And what would be the point of hanging on?
Just to be the lining of belief, after belief itself is gone?

(from “Meditatio Placentae”)