Texas Review Press, a member of Texas A&M University Consortium,
TAMU published Mary Morris’s fourth book February 2025.
ISBN-paper: 978-1-680 03404-2
Would you like to come with me? / Take my hand. The past is gone,” is the beckoning that opens Mary Morris’s fourth poetry collection, Lanterns in the Night Market. The collection is an invitation into reflected wanderlust, and with Morris’s humorous observations, the reader experiences typical travel woes, such as in the poem “LaGuardia,” “There are no angels in airports / though demons linger / among bars.” There is also a deeper exploration of time in place with the dual cycling (history and Ferris wheels) in “London,” “...the London Eye spins above / the River Thames. / History shifts in its waters. Sonnets / of Shakespeare repeat in theaters.” We follow her eloquent speakers from Bangkok to Madrid with poems deeply rooted in place. Not only the physical locations, but the more emotional journeys that we take while navigating travel. Do we feel out of place, or precisely in place? What if the line between mundane and mythical is thinner than we might realize? Mary Morris shines in her ability to make a familiar place magical and, conversely, an unfamiliar place feel like home. continue to link
Recent review from the North American Review
further praise for Lanterns in the Night Market
“In the tradition of Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Morris poses questions of travel in her luminously attentive Lanterns in the Night Market. This peripatetic collection opens with a compelling invitation that also hints at a potential sadness, loss, or rootlessness. ‘Take my hand’ says the speaker. ‘The past is gone.’ What ensues is a gorgeous slide projector of place after place: ‘everything and and and.’ These are clear-eyed poems that gaze candidly at trouble and troubled places—taking in the complexities of history, politics, and environmental crisis. But these are also poems of immense gratitude—revealing a poetic joy within the gorgeously-rendered details and images. This is a lovely and powerful volume.”
— Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50
“A poem in Mary Morris’ gorgeous Lanterns in the Night Market begins, ‘There is an atlas inside your body—/a certain instinct toward discovery’; this collection is an invitation to explore the world, guided by a seasoned and astute traveler whose missives include dreams, memories, and visions, poems like carefully framed snapshots of Laos, Bangkok, Angor Wat, Beirut, Mexico, and elsewhere. Morris claims in the first poem, ‘Invitation,’ that ‘the past is gone,’ but in these poems it is not ignored or forgotten. Morris does not sidestep or avoid destruction, death, and decay in the past or the present, even while pointing over and over again to exquisite details. These poems display Morris’ prowess with concentration and skillful compression. As radiant as the woman in ‘Bioluminescence,’ swimming on her 80th birthday, this book, too, glows with an eerie, captivating beauty.”
— Rebecca Aronson, author of Anchor
“Mary Morris casts light, reflecting the incandescence of the traveled world, the sensory invitations, the way we may feel another panel within us opening ‘to drink tiny fits of dreams.’ Here, to travel means to register yearning and to experience both beauty and suffering ‘even if it hollows you, / stranger.’ These far-reaching, luminous, exquisite poems chronicle plenitude, the blessings of attuned and generous observation, and what to make of our encounters: ‘This is my torch: ink / to invent my way.’”
— Lee Upton, author of The Day Every Day Is, Tabitha, and Get Up