Still Life

Still Life gathers people, creatures, and landscapes in poetic still-life vignettes reminiscent of traditional still-life paintings, which capture the landscape as a memento mori, "a memento of mortality." Through free verse, form, narrative, and prose poems, Megan Huwa recounts her body's decline in 2012 at age twenty-seven due to a rare condition that has ushered her into a life of suffering, uprooting her and her husband from her family's fifth-generation Colorado farm, and stilling them in a condo in Southern California. The four-part collection paints life's mercurial seasons, with underlying redemptive threads. The poetic vignettes serve as a keen act of observance and remembrance, beholding Life, the life to come, and the life all around through the miracle of a broken step, a new cross-section of mercy, the life in another's dance, the overlooked beheld, the wondrous done in secret, the life amid loss, the land resown, and the promised home glorified.