POETRY

Sebastian Merrill’s debut collection GHOST :: SEEDS explores a dialogue between a trans-masculine speaker and his former self, incorporating myth and magical realism in a journey that takes us from the Maine coast to the underworld and back. GHOST :: SEEDS has received multiple awards including:

Winner of the 2024 Stonewall Honor Book - Barbara Gittings Literature Award from the American Library Association

Selected for the Poetry Longlist for the 2024 Mass Book Awards from Massachusetts Center for the Book

2024 Boston Authors Club Julia Ward Howe Awards Notable Book

Selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press

Selected by Ellen Doré Watson as the winner of the 2022 Levis Prize for Poetry from Friends of Writers

Finalist for the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize from Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions

Sebastian has received additional support and honors including: 

Recipient of a 2024 Vermont Studio Center Residency

Headliner for the 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival at the Emily Dickinson Museum

Chosen as a member of the 2023 Get the Word Out inaugural poetry cohort for debut writers from Poets & Writers 

Named a staff-scholar for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2022 and 2023

Selected as the Warren Wilson MFA Alumni Residency Fellow for Summer 2023

Sebastian has also received support from Tin House Workshop and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He served as a reader for The Paris Review from 2019-2021. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and a BA in English Literature, Creative Writing, and South Asian Studies from Wellesley College.

GHOST :: SEEDS

Set on a remote island on the Maine coast, GHOST :: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a transmasculine speaker and a figure that he conceptualizes as his ghost, the girl-ghost of the self that he left behind to become the person he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from an underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave. The ocean serves as a throughline connecting the speaker and his lost self, providing a setting in which everything is continually in flux: the cycle of the tides, the pounding surf against the rocky coast, and the ever-present threat of pollution and climate change. Kayaking through a coastline studded with islands, alongside seals, porpoises, and herons, amid swirls of floating plastic, we are invited into a world in which the only constant is change. Alternating between prose-like elements and lyric meditations, the book’s expansive form makes full use of the page from margin to margin, creating space and breathing room for complicated investigations of memory, gender, and grief. 

cover design by Zander Schlacter

Praise for GHOST :: SEEDS

  • “In Sebastian Merrill’s collection GHOST :: SEEDS, there is the gorgeous clarity of the crossing—the “trans-”—as much as there is an abiding haziness by that self and certainly by others. And, for this reader, there is a haunting sense that I have experienced my own version of that dynamic. The speaker’s realizations emerge in large part through an insistent play with language. From the first poem, the point of view is plural: me with My man’s name and you ‘(my ghost),’ Girl-ghost, inverted twin, lost sister. At times, Gender is embodied: my Gender wanders in the underworld. At other times, the ‘you’ enters into a sequence ‘Ghost :: Persephone’ where the you is an interpretation of Persephone who can tell their singular story. A moment of kayaking, for instance, is set against this backdrop and yet Merrill doesn’t retell the myth so much as use it as touchstone. What is missed, found, mourned, and celebrated is a reason for celebration. Thank you, Sebastian Merrill.”

    Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies, and final judge

  • “This two-voiced manuscript of direct address struck me as the most fully realized and most moving of all the contenders…I am riveted by their story, and by the brilliant way they enact it (almost as a separate dances, gradually approaching one another), and by the way the voices alternate, each with a signature style…There are also terrific ‘Gender’ poems…which are set in italics and create their own impressionistic version of the work’s trajectory…When there is a real-world setting, it’s at the grandparents’ home on an island in Maine, from which the speaker sets out in a kayak and discovers a cavern he’s drawn to but doesn’t enter. Persephone, whose path meanwhile ‘sluices through granite / and limestone, into caverns / of water and night,’ tells him that he must enter the cave to find her, so he ‘folds [his] body into the unknown / scream of earth / and hidden light.’ The result is a poem with a right-justified column of text in his voice on the left and a left-justified column of text in her voice on the right—and the whole thing can also be read horizontally, perfectly yoking the two together despite the physical space that remains between them. It’s breathtaking.”

    Ellen Doré Watson, 2022 Levis Prize guest judge

  • “Every poem happens in the body, yes, but the poems in Sebastian Merrill’s GHOST :: SEEDS are doubly embodied. This collection foregrounds the somatic nature of poetry’s choreographed language in order to make flesh an emergent speaking self who cherishes his hard-won existence. Like a muscular dancer whose soft landings turn effort to grace, these poems handle the weightiest concerns with a lightness of touch that amazed me across the book. I need a new word to name the emotion evoked by the lucid palimpsest of transformations Merrill enacts in this celebration of what can only come into being by letting go of what was—or by holding what was, even when it’s gone. Every poem in this stunning debut is an alchemical swirl of eye, ear, tongue, and lung. These poems made me breathe deeper.”

    Jason Schneiderman, author of Hold Me Tight

  • “The joy of the body, the dream of the body, the myth of the body, the making. I just love this book in all its embodiments. Can a book of poems see me? It feels like this book does, in the way it marks the history of how many selves one body can hold and how history is the slipperiest part that never leaves us. How do we make peace with what is left behind in the luminous journey to become our deepest truth. What does lineage mean? What is home? In this book the land welcomes and makes a path for the bodily vessel: a kind of pedagogy the earth and the water gives us. I feel so deeply indebted to the joy, grief and, generosity of this formally and psychically rigorous book. How astonishing ordinary life is. And how hard won.”

    Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic

  • “GHOST :: SEEDS testifies to poetry’s ability to make meaning of experience, to render experience into language, and to gather time, space, feelings and thought and give those elements an artful home. Before Sebastian Merrill wrote this remarkable book, we did not have this thrilling lyrical narrative of trans experience braided into myth, in which the orphic poet transits into the underworld to encounter his former self. Here, however, the myth is more than a story; it is a narrative newly arrived in our contemporary context, placed on the rocky shores of Maine, dealt with in a 21st century world of vivid, liberating self-realization. GHOST :: SEEDS is a moving, nuanced, and memorable book, and one of the most exciting debuts I’ve read in years.”

    Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness

  • “This layered multiplicitous speaker/place might be confusing or overwhelming in another poet’s hands but Merrill’s voice is calm, lyrical, and taut throughout, generously leading us with expert pacing through three long interwoven poems that complement, shadow, and reflect each other like three currents in one river. I never felt alone in this book—the speaker was always right there with me, experiencing the same empathetic place. With him, I felt the book’s central confusion for what it is: a grief that is also a love, a descent that is also an ascent, a loss that is also a gift. GHOST :: SEEDS reminds us: the body is a place, every place is a body, and both are alive with haunted history and always in flux, never stable, never singular, never still.”

    Daniela Naomi Molnar, author of Chorus

  • “Sebastian Merrill’s GHOST :: SEEDS sings into a rich tradition of trans poetics while also charting its own unprecedented course through the wilds of history, myth, nature. In one poem, he writes, ‘If Spring comes, / I will know // my name.’ In another, ‘Yet always I feel you tight within, / a second heartbeat / inside my chest.’ Merrill is the rare emerging poet who possesses not just an urgent narrative, but also the unmistakable lyric and psychospiritual maturity to render that narrative into unforgettable poems that will illuminate and usefully complicate the lives of its readers. GHOST :: SEEDS announces the arrival of an important new voice in American poetry.”

    Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

Reviews and Press

  • Sebastian Merrill’s powerful, elegant debut, GHOST :: SEEDS, offers us the opportunity to share a complicated, beautiful place with the wide, manifold consciousness of a speaker who is many speakers at once. Likewise, the place this book makes is many places at once, reminding us of the teeming hauntedness of our world, the way all places are dense with histories and mythologies. It reminds us that time is thick and fluid, a medium we’re always wading through.

    Daniela Naomi Molnar for Leon Literary Review

  • Drawing inspiration from the story of Persephone, Merrill puts a queer spin on the classic myth, recontextualizing the story to examine gender and identity, change and loss. A book-length poem is no easy feat, but Merrill walks the tightrope of engaging and thoughtful with preternatural ease.

    Josh Christie for Portland Press Herald

  • Winner of the prestigious X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press, this volume reimagines the story of Persephone in the Underworld. Set on a remote island off the Maine coast, GHOST :: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth. The central tension of the work is a dialogue between a transmasculine speaker and a figure that he conceptualizes as his ghost—the “girl-ghost” —of the self that he left behind to become the person he is today.

    Wellesley Magazine

  • An interview with Sebastian Merrill on the town of Amherst, the magic of libraries, and walks with his dog Daphne.

    Jones Library Local Author Spotlight

  • As we cross the threshold into a new phase of our lives, how do we speak to our past selves? “If our mother were to tell our story,” the speaker offers, “it would begin with grief./ She mourned your loss,/ her only daughter.” Ghost::Seeds is a book length dialogue between a trans-masculine speaker and his former self, now a girl-ghost. To create texture and variation across manuscript, Merrill weaves in a second sequence, a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, a coming-of-age myth itself, about the separation of daughter from mother, the movement into the winter of one’s life, that leads to adulthood.

    Megan Pinto for Electric Lit

Conversations about GHOST :: SEEDS

“Looking out you can see all the way to the horizon. Sometimes the sea is smooth as glass and sometimes you get these huge ocean swells. The ocean itself is so alive.”

“One of the aspects of writing the book that was really liberating for me was letting go of trying to adhere to any normative narratives of the self and giving myself the freedom to be playful on the page, to allow these voices to come into their own.”

“I started thinking about the double colon as a doorway. I really liked having two sets of the colons rather than just one because they were mirroring themselves, and so they were holding space in a different way… There’s this kind of doubling and layering of personas with those poems that feels complex for even me to hold, as a poet.”

“It feels important to me to be who I am in the world and on the page. I think there is vulnerability in that, but there’s also a lot of power in not hiding.”

Selected Publications

Pleiades | “Open a door into grief” and “Blue” October 2024

Driftwood Press 2024 Anthology | “An Apple Cleft in Two” & interview March 2024

The Cortland Review | “Night Animals” February 2024

Diode Poetry Journal | “dead name” and “The Sea Cave” August 2023

Salamander Magazine | “to the girl who once was me” and “Gender Diagram VI” July 2023

The Common | “To My Ghost :: Float” June 2023

Cobra Milk | “Hades” May 2023

Four Way Review | “inverse twin, lost sister” & “Persephone, am I the pomegranate and you the seed?” April 2023

American Literary Review | “Why I Left You: Reason #19” April 2023

Birdcoat Quarterly | “ghost traps” & “Was I once called Persephone?” April 2023

Riddle Fence | “Gender Diagram II” March 2023

The Columbia Review | “Devoured” February 2023

Passages North | “T4T” December 2022

Nonbinary Review | “Tideline” December 2022

Broadsided Press | “Letter With My Ghost” October 2022

wildness | “To My Ghost” August 2022

Leon Literary Review | “Persephone & Cerberus” & “Persephone, Spring” June 2020

Editing Services

Thank you for your interest in editing. In accordance with standard freelancer rates—

My rates are $45 for 1 page, $60 for 2 pages, $100 for 5-6 pages, $175 for 10-12 pages, $375 for a chapbook (24-36 pages), and $750 for a full-length collection (50-100 pages). I typically ask for half of this payment up front and the other half upon delivery of feedback. Payment plans and special rates are available upon request; if my standard rates are not doable for you, please let me know, and I will do my best to find a way for us to work together. Critiques include both line notes and a feedback letter. For accessibility purposes we can also speak through poems/collection via Zoom or FaceTime.

For all inquiries including editing/consultation services use contact box below. Thank you!

 

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