Bertha Comes Down

Bertha Comes Down by Megan Pattie is a collection steeped in metamorphosis, haunting, and quiet resistance. Drawing on myth, the gothic, and the occult, Pattie explores the thresholds between madness and recovery, body and landscape, self and spectral other. Her verse is richly imagistic and finely wrought, moving through poems-as-incantations, narratives of possession, and shapeshifting lyric forms. Whether invoking foxes, gorgons, or isolation tanks, the poems assert a lucid, unsettled presence, offering neither resolution nor retreat, but a deepened sense of psychic and poetic agency.