This book is a sequel to The Year Without You, chronicling "the 7 years that followed after".

Some relationships are ended with commas, and some with periods. From the prior book, in which the writer’s lover says very clearly to her after the breakup, “I don’t see myself together with you ever again,” one would have thought this one ended with a period. The sequel begins with the writer turning over her ex’s “unrealistic goal of our friendship”, picturing herself handing over her heart to him “shard by shard”. The next page quotes the song “he’s got the whole world in his hands”, the ‘h’ uncapitalized, as if the writer is unsure whether it is God or her ex fiancé holding her world in his hands. This book hints at his having moved on before she has, and shows him having arrived back in her life (seemingly single again) looking for friendship after a couple years have passed. The poems are as image-heavy as the illustrations (mainly breathtakingly beautiful photos by Zeb Telfer and Cory Kaufman), with Merry describing the hole they dug together in her “soul-yard” as a “sweet love pond” and complaining that when that love evaporated, it became an obstacle, a hole she would fall in if she was not careful. We feel the ache with her, of the complicated untangling of the connections of the loved one to everyday things that takes place after a significant breakup, and the horror she feels when they start spending time together again, wondering “what will be left/when this laughter dies”. There is an indication that he wishes her to “give in, and love [him], as once [she] did”. Over the next four or five years, we feel her intermittent struggle to move on, against her feeling that he is her “One Great Love”, the “one no one will ever live up to” and how she feels bitterly (in light of what has transpired between them) that she “will never love anyone as [she] loved [him], not even [him]”.

Toward the end of the book, she has a moment of realization that he does not love her as she wishes to be loved, and recognizes that holding on to the friendship while her love is unrequited is too painful to continue. The last poem ends with finality. She states, “This is the last poem for you” and we believe her. We hear with her, the “great door” shutting “with a clang” between them. In this last poem, the interpretations of the two lovers regarding what had happened differ, and we are not given the resolution of being told whose interpretation is correct or if either is. Like many relationships, the issues involved are so complex that it is difficult to know exactly what happened in the end.



This poetry chapbook is saddle-stitched, 8.5” x 11”, illustrated with black and white photography (by Zeb Telfer and Cory Kaufman, along with a couple public domain images), printed in 2022 with 23 poems across 33 pages.