Tattoo of Letters, by Anna Eaton-Merkle

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Tattoo of Letters is a lyric chapbook attentive to the ways language enters the body and stays there—through love, grief, inheritance, and time. These poems move through intimate landscapes shaped by memory and repetition, where words are felt as marks rather than abstractions, carrying both tenderness and ache. The collection traces how language accumulates, how it is learned, misheard, repeated, and carried forward, shaping the speaker long after the moment of utterance has passed. With careful attention to sound and image, Tattoo of Letters offers poems that linger in the quiet aftermath of experience. The work resists easy resolution, favoring close observation and emotional honesty over explanation. Taken together, the poems form a record of endurance—of how language can wound and shelter at once, leaving its imprint not only on the page, but on the life that moves through it. Anna Eaton-Merkle is a poet, educator, and writer whose work explores language, memory, and the ways experience leaves its mark over time. She taught English for more than thirty-five years and holds a doctorate in education. She is the author of the chapbook I Carry You, and her poems are rooted in close attention to sound, image, and emotional restraint. She lives in Idaho, where she continues to write and observe the natural world.