Shannon K. Winston
A Review of Megan Merchant’s Hortensia, in winter
“Hortensia, were you given the smallest room in the house of your own life?” the speaker asks Hortensia, Megan Merchant’s ancestor and the subject of this collection. When one hears this question, one cannot but think of Virginia Woolf’s famous assertion that women need a room of their own to write and claim creative agency. In Hortensia, in Winter, Merchant exercises her own creative agency to explore the life of her “grandfather’s great-grandmother” (17) metaphorically giving her a room of her own. Hortensia settled in Magnolia, Iowa, with her husband Lucius in 1852. Though they were Mormons, they left the church after polygamy was accepted, later rejoining under new leadership.
Hortensia, in Winter is a beautiful and compelling work of recovery and discovery. Through prose poems—many in epistolary form—Merchant reconstructs Hortensia’s complex history, addressing her directly and questioning a figure both familiar (an “ancestor,” 18) and enigmatic (a “glyph,” 18). In “Invocation,” the speaker asks, “What do I know about this life that wasn’t built on your foundation?” (17)—expressing their shared lineage.
By contrast, in another poem, the speaker confronts how little she knows about Hortensia: “Are your eyes hazel, do they shift in the onslaught of spring? The blue of needing another body to remind you of your own? Did you feel desire but give it your husband’s name?” (29) These three questions reveal the speaker’s desire to know and identify with Hortensia, as well as the distance between them—made evident by the need to ask at all. It is through letters that the speaker first came to know Hortensia, and by adopting the same genre, she deepens the inquiry, using the form that revealed Hortensia to also imagine her more fully. These dynamics are evident in the poem “Merciful,” where the speaker writes:
“What have I become that wasn’t already weft into the cloth of my
story? When your letters were gifted into my hands, I knew I’d
already traced your cursive into sleep. Hortensia, I write you
back into being as if that’s enough.” (23)
These questions—about how the speaker can know and fully capture Hortensia’s life—reside at the heart of this collection, where Merchant’s act of writing becomes a partial, always incomplete reconstruction: an attempt to situate the speaker in relation to Hortensia and to the past. It is, after all, impossible to render someone’s life completely and fully on the page, something that Merchant’s speaker considers poignantly and lyrically throughout the collection. It is, in part, this incompleteness that renders the collection so poignant and haunting.
Hortensia is both a subject and a reflection of the speaker, helping her grapple with motherhood and gender. In one of the collection’s first poems, “Dear Hortensia,” the speaker imagines the difficulty of Hortensia’s labor during which her hemline was “soaked wet in shit and faith” (18). Here, as elsewhere in the collection, Merchant’s imagery fuses beauty (“faith”) with abjection (“shit”), highlighting the female body’s resilience during childbirth. It is through Hortensia’s body, as the speaker images it, that the speaker reflects on her own relationship to her body and to motherhood. In “Nauvoo: Interior Temple Burned by an Arsonist—1846,” the speaker implores: “tell me Hortensia, which part of my body can still be forgiven? I am growing my hair longer than our hair longer than our bloodline. I am braiding it as a rope to reach you” (40). Women’s bodies, both Hortensia’s and the speaker’s, become sites of faith and revelation, as well as contestation and revolt. Women’s bodies are sites of regeneration—of children, inherited narratives, and loss. The speaker in “Portraiture: Dark Room in Self,” for example, laments the way her first child left her drained and “sucked the color clean, took that brightness for himself” (51).
With great care, Merchant chisels each of her images until they shine. It is through her focus on the everyday and on details such as the “[c]hokecherry, lilac, maple” in Hortensia’s garden that the scene comes alive. Elsewhere, the speaker observes “the slurry of gnats that funnel from an empty can, the sweet licked all-clean” (20). While gnats are often seen as a nuisance, the “sweet” evokes taste and something delicious. Through the evocation of the senses, Merchant animates her poems and directly engages her readers so that they, too, feel as though they are encountering different landscapes and worlds. It is through estrangement that these poems create a sense of wonder, such as when the speaker describes “mint cantering through the air” (37). The unusual image of “mint cantering” is fresh and original, as one thinks of horses cantering, not mint. This is but a small example of the way Merchant’s images teem with marvel and loss, beauty and rot.
Merchant’s Hortensia, in Winter is a rich collection that will appeal to a wide range of readers—those interested in religion and the history of Mormonism, gender and female agency, or lyrical poems and associational leaps in prose poems. This collection is also breathtaking in how it weaves archival and personal histories into the poet’s quest to understand herself and her past.
Shannon K. Winston
Shannon K. Winston is the author of The Worry Dolls (Glass Lyre Press, 2025) and The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press, 2021). Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, the Los Angeles Review, RHINO Poetry, SWWIM Every Day, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com/.