"Again, darlings, again." (Melissa Atkinson Mercer on Knock)

Melissa Atkinson Mercer is the author of Knock, out March 1st, 2018 from Half Mystic Press. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Moon City Review, Zone 3, Blue Earth Review, and A Portrait in Blues: An Anthology of Identity, Gender and Bodies, among others. She has an MFA from West Virginia University, where she won the Russell MacDonald Creative Writing Award in Poetry. She currently works and teaches at Lees-McRae College.

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Ask & it will be given to you; seek & you will find; knock & the door will be opened to you.

—Bible, New International Version, Matthew 7:7

As someone who grew up in the Southern Bible belt, this verse was a key piece of my religious heritage: ask, seek, knock. You will receive everything you need.

But who is this elusive you? Whose voice is heard? For whom will the door be opened?

As I attended church after church & listened to (male) pastor after (male) pastor, the answer became increasingly clear: you had to be human. You had to be male.

How do we decide who matters & to what degree? We species them; we gender them; we race them; we sexualize them; we erase & confine them.

When I refused to have my father walk me down the aisle at my wedding, the officiant pulled me aside. A woman goes from the protection of her father’s house to her husband’s, she told me. Won’t you reconsider? This was in Los Angeles. In 2013.

When men knock, someone answers. I just had to hope I was along for the ride, under someone’s protection.

Even my mother, handwriting the nameplates for the reception, started writing every couple’s name with the man’s name first. I want us to start over, I told her. I want us to write every single woman’s name first.

So the writing of Knock began.

As a process of refusal. Of reclamation. Of speaking out & demanding entry. Of re-writing the women (both real & mythical) that the Christian tradition insists on erasing & defanging.

At the same time, Knock chronicles a journey deep into the long fields of mental illness, something else that we constantly attempt to erase & defang. If you’re depressed, you’re weak; you’re selfish; you’re not praying hard enough; the devil has his claws in your skin.

If you’re a woman struggling with mental illness, then, who are you? What monster will you—have you—become?

Knock is a back & forth, a dialogue, a push & pull, a question & answer. It calls upon the voices of other women—maternal relatives, female authors who’ve struggled with depression, Ursula (both sea witch & saint)—to craft a story of the self that the self can truly inhabit.

When we speak up—when we speak out—we make choices not only about how we define ourselves, but about how we define others. We choose which stories we reject & which ones we embrace. We choose whose voices we’re willing to listen to, which myths become history & which histories become myth.

The tongue is powerful—it is both body & voice, past & future, self & monster. The tongue knocks against the body; the body knocks against the world. As the speaker says in the book’s title poem:

If I could be loud enough, if incessant, the door might truly open—so I taught them, the thirsty pigs, lifting their hooves to fence posts: one, two, three & again, darlings, again.

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Knock is the fiercely musical highly anticipated debut release from Half Mystic Press. In it, Melissa Atkinson Mercer interrogates the width, weight, and wholeness of depression, calling out to a self reflected back as monster, as myth, as song and water and tongue. Knock asks us to consider the complications of gender and voice: who gets to speak, who gets listened to, whose stories turn to fact and whose to fiction. Unflinching and tender, this book reminds us what it takes to navigate the mind’s dark seas and come out alive. It is available for preorder now.