Share the Wealth is my third full-length collection of poetry, published by Veliz Books on March 1, 2022.
It was a finalist for the 2023 Maine Literary Awards!
Order it here!
Emily Holland reviewed the book for Boog City
Sandra Beasley interviewed me about the book, also for Boog City
Leslie Pietrzyk interviewed me about the book for her blog, Work in Progress
Interested in a review copy? Want to interview me, or book me for a reading! No problem — just contact me.
Advance Praise for Share the Wealth
I’m a huge fan of Maureen Thorson’s imaginative, funny, and intelligent explorations of life’s more multifaceted moments—the kind that change color when you hold them up to the light. The timely poems in Share the Wealth straddle the line between personal and universal via luscious sound, nimble shifts in form, and spot-on readings of the subconscious at work. '...with so much poised to slip away, / I figured it safest to fix my affections / on what had already disappeared.'
— Jennifer L. Knox, author of Crushing It
Share the Wealth
Maureen Thorson’s collection Share the Wealth combines playful persona poems and satires with beautiful lyrics about life in the woods. One can’t move to Maine without channeling the ghost of James Schuyler, so it's not surprising that his careful and sly observational style informs Thorson’s most grounded lyrics. "Bliss is relative," says a frog in one of her poems, and I'm grateful to these poems for reminding us to look for bliss, however relative it may be.
— Joanna Fuhrman, author of To a New Era
I'd call Maureen Thorson’s Share the Wealth quietly captivating, if it didn’t truthtell so insistently and open the mind with bright images that make familiarities like January, for example, more permanently real than they’ve ever been: “And last year’s flowerpots drift in the snowpack //burnt sugar dusk / persistent non-roar / of the highway over the river /that uses the thick light like pomade.” Other moments skate by like Olympians, and you only recognize their power when they’ve left you behind, marveling, like this one tucked into an encounter with some skittish wild turkeys: “This world is chockablock / with death and joy and hazard, /and it would be right for a woman alone /to be its scariest thing.” These poems comfort and discomfit, coaxing weirdness out of the familiar, deep emotion out of the natural world, acceptance out of tragedy. You’ll find this book’s unique perceptions--for a moment, for good--will locate themselves somewhere in you.
— Kathleen Ossip, author of July
Want to read some poems from the book? Here are a few!