Poetry. Paper, Perfect Bound. 72 pages
2025, ISBN: 978-1-952781-29-2 $22.95 $18.36 + S&H SPECIAL ADVANCE ORDER PRICE
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Oleander Marriage is the eighth collection of poetry from acclaimed author Eleanor Lerman. The poems in this collection ache with longing for days gone by; for the bond between mothers and daughters broken too soon; for nights spent in grim hotels; dawns clouded by lonely dreams; and roar with the grief of monsters who are not what they seem. How memory shapes the voices we hear in our thoughts as we grow older is also examined in these poems, as is the need to resist the inevitability of an elegiac season to come. In these pages, the author also considers how each life creates a unique treasury of souvenirs collected from all the things it hoped for as well as those it never found along the way.
In commenting on her work, celebrated poet Tony Hoagland put Eleanor Lehman in the category of “social” poets, those whose work “engages the reality of the collective, as well as the emotional concerns of an individual speaker.” He noted that her poems are like stories that while rooted in the lives of individuals also reveal much about our shared universal constants.
Praise for Eleanor Lerman’s work:
Readers familiar with Lerman’s earlier work can expect Oleander Marriage to continue her fearless examination of sexuality, identity, and cultural critique, delivered with a voice that remains as fresh and urgent as when she first burst onto the literary scene. Her ability to marry personal narrative with broader social commentary ensures that this collection will resonate with both longtime fans and new readers seeking poetry that confronts the complexities of modern life without flinching. – The J (International Jewish News)
Grief
What approaches in the night, the endless night?
Not monsters—they are old friends from
a flickering screen: Tokyo dies again,
the nuclear monster stomps back
into the sea and I want to know
where he has gone.
Where is he now?
Then a woman dies in 1964 with only
her cousin to hold her hand.
Lillian. That was the woman’s name.
My father is somewhere screaming.
Where is my brother?
Where am I?
Now a cat is yowling in the night.
Now I feel the absence of my dog.
Decades, decades, decades march
on and on and I still don’t know
how to recover. God, I am old
now and still I wonder:
Where is she?
If her ghost would appear,
I would learn to talk to a ghost.
Instead, I live in a dark house,
a lonely house with a lonely wind
coming wild through the windows.
She left in winter, but I remember spring:
sitting at the kitchen table, a strawberry
pattern on the oilcloth. Did she love me?
Who can be sure, this far away in time?
And the cat is still yowling in the night.
It never stops.
I can go on writing this forever, but it
won’t help. Sunny days won’t help:
they are disfigured. Even my body
is disfigured—or so it seems to me.
I don’t look like myself anymore,
and of course, that makes it worse.
She was younger than I am now,
and the cat is still yowling.
Morning doesn’t help.
Grief was anger once, but
now it is only what it is,
what it does.
And it is still approaching,
sitting beside me. Lillian, it says,
and the nuclear monster
howls from the depth of the sea.
It had a mother once.
It knows
About Eleanor Lerman
During a career that now spans over fifty years, Eleanor Lerman has published numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories, and novels. One of the youngest people ever to be named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, she also won the inaugural Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Poets, among other accolades. In addition, her novels have been recognized with numerous awards including the John W. Campbell Award for Best Book of Science Fiction and being shortlisted for The Chautauqua Prize; recent awards for her short fiction have included being named a finalist for the Missouri Review Perkoff Prize. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for poetry and the New York Foundation for the Arts for fiction. Her most recent work, Slim Blue Universe (Mayapple Press 2023) was named a Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Award program. In 2026, She Writes Press will publish King the Wonder Dog and Other Stories, her collection of new short stories.