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Nov 23, 2024 | 
douglascountysentinel.com | Lucy Mercer
A walk in the woods is a popular activity in our area most of the year. It’s especially nice in fall, whether you’re hiking at Sweetwater Creek State Park or at Clinton Nature Preserve or taking a walking through your own neighborhood. Walking in the woods is great way to get exercise and fresh air. In these natural areas, we tend to look up at the leaves on the trees as they change color and fall.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
creativecritical.net | Sam Buchan-Watts |Lucy Mercer |John Clarke |Jess Cotton
By Sam Buchan-Watts and Lucy Mercer. On 10 May 2024 we held a closed, eight-person symposium in a seminar room at MayDay Rooms entitled ‘Poetry and Indiscipline’.
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Sep 7, 2024 | 
douglascountysentinel.com | Lucy Mercer
Homeowners and gardeners are interested in growing fruit in their backyards. This may be to address food insecurity, or just to have a productive outdoor space. Douglas County gardeners are blessed with a long growing season, from mid-April to late October. In this time, you can grow many kinds of fruits. Strawberries are easy and if you choose an ever-bearing variety and mulch through the winter, you’ll have a perennial strawberry bed.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
douglascountysentinel.com | Lucy Mercer
Bouquets of flowers are a treat, whether grown in your garden, purchased in a store, or delivered from your favorite flower shop. You want to enjoy the flowers as long as possible. I’ve researched the do’s and don’ts of keeping cut flowers fresh and have a few tips to share. First, let’s learn about cut flowers in your garden. The most popular flowers for bouquets that you can grow in your garden include: Celosia, Cosmos, Daisy, Lilies, Peonies, Roses, Salvia, Strawflower, and Zinnia.
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
port-magazine.com | Lucy Mercer
Ben Lerner discusses his remarkable new poetry collectionWhat possibilities can be salvaged from bad forms? How can we breathe together, collectively? Can poems sing the corporate voice alongside the personal voice? These are some of the preoccupations that Ben Lerner’s extraordinary new poetry collection The Lights tunes into, cutting with and against the grain of language.
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Jan 30, 2024 | 
londonreviewbookshop.co.uk | Rachael Allen |Lucy Mercer
‘Here is a wasteland / of parched aesthetics / patched up with modern tubes’ – Rachael Allen’s long-awaited second collection, God Complex, is a long narrative poem describing the breakdown of a relationship against a backdrop of environmental degradation and toxicity. She read from the collection, and was in conversation with the poet Lucy Mercer, whose first collection is Emblem (Prototype, 2022).
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Nov 17, 2023 | 
douglascountysentinel.com | Lucy Mercer
Walking around my garden on these gorgeous fall days, it’s a good time to evaluate my garden performance for the year. Five plants shining in my garden right now are on my must-have list for next summer. Two are annuals grown from seed, two are perennial herbs that overwinter well, and the fifth is a surprisingly colorful shrub. Any guesses what my late season favorites are? ‘Torch’ Tithonia, Mexican sunflower.
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Oct 18, 2023 | 
artreview.com | Lucy Mercer
The Nobel Prize–winning poet made the most of poetry as a form of private communicationPoetry has an obsessive, close relationship to death, and writing poems is in some ways a practice of dying well. Over the years, Louise Glück’s poems, which so often consider the intractability of death, have become for me – as for so many others – an essential voice patterned inside my head, a guide of sorts: ‘I wake up thinking / you have to prepare.
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May 19, 2023 | 
douglascountysentinel.com | Lucy Mercer
Spring is catching on. The days are warm, the nights are cool and the sun sets after 8 p.m., leaving more time for gardening. The average date of last frost in spring for our area is April 14, and I think we’re safe in saying that we won’t see nighttime temperatures near freezing until fall. With that in mind, let’s jump into a few notes from my spring garden. MushroomsFirst up: this spring’s wet, cool weather makes for easy planting.
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Apr 21, 2023 | 
douglascountysentinel.com | Lucy Mercer
Regenerative gardening means working with nature to create a balanced, interconnected habitat for plants and animals. The concept includes fauna, fungi and bacteria that live in soil, as well as the insects and animals that we interact with day to day. When you adopt regenerative gardening practices, you promote a healthy backyard ecosystem. Gardening in tune with nature’s cycles offers benefits like reduced “food miles,” and the carbon costs of producing and transporting food.
