Riverbed Treasures

Riverbed Treasures is a debut collection by Grand Rapids poet and photographer Sarah Clarissa Mieras (aka sarahclarissa), a book that treats the Grand River as both witness and archive. Moving through five braided sequences-Humanity, War, Ancient Waters, Woman, Sex, and The Poet's Ways-these poems sift the ordinary for what survives: rusted history, river glass, protest signs, love's syntax, and the hard facts of the body.

Mieras writes with a steady, activist attention to what power tries to erase: poverty made invisible, pandemic losses reduced to numbers, Indigenous histories fenced off or paved over, and the lingering stain of war. As a second-generation Agent Orange survivor living with spina bifida, she brings lived experience to poems that name chemical warfare's inheritance and insist on record, turning private pain into public witness without sacrificing lyric precision.

A longtime journalist, editor, and photographer, Mieras reports from the "urban smear" with a documentary eye, then turns and listens for the lyric underneath: the hum of traffic over water, the hush before a kiss, the quick ache of desire, the sudden flare of frisson in a front-row crowd. Love poems and erotic poems sit beside protest poems not as escape but as proof of life-pleasure as survival, attention as resistance. Queer embodiment, grief, and defiance move through the book like weather: felt, changing, and impossible to ignore.

The river poems are the collection's pulse: meditations on memory, ancestry, and place-Grand Rapids as Baw-Wa-Ting, "at the rapids," a turning point where layers of time meet the current. Mieras's language is direct, image-driven, and musical, welcoming readers who want poetry that speaks plainly and still makes room for surprise.

Riverbed Treasures includes the author's photographs of the Grand River, grounding the work in the physical environment that shaped it. These poems invite readers to feel seen, and see others. It is also a love letter to music, to protest, and to the voice onstage. The result is a book of hard-won beauty and conscience-poetry that moves like water over stone, does not look away, and asks what kind of kindness, courage, and becoming we might still choose.