Terrible Blooms
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Ms. Stein reminds us that there is no honey—rough, or otherwise—without the sting." —The New York Times
In this lush, disturbing second collection from Melissa Stein, exquisite images are salvaged from harm and survival. Set against the natural world’s violence—both ordinary and sublime—pain shines jewel-like out of these poems, illuminating what lovers and families conceal. Stein uses her gifts for persona and lyric richness to build worlds that are vivid, intricate, tough, sexy, and raw: "over and over // life slapping you in the face / till you’re newly burnished / flat-out gasping and awake." Breathless with risk and redemption, Terrible blooms shows how loss claims us and what we reclaim.
"[Melissa Stein’s] sentences are beautifully choreographed; they start and stop the motion of her poems with a nearly invisible, effortless authority." —Mark Doty
"[Stein’s] electric apprehensions throb with this nearly preverbal knowing. They are rough as a hound’s tongue. . . . Stein is a new poet of the first order." —Molly Peacock
Quarry
As you slept
I was thinking about the quarry,
about light going deeper
into earth, into rock, the hurt
of light hitting layers
that should be hidden,
that should be buried,
and how when it rained
for a long time that absence filled
with suffering, and we swam.
Melissa Stein’s debut collection Rough Honey won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of California at Davis, and is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stein (Rough Honey) pursues a kind of rejuvenation through language in her second collection, seeking a way to reckon with trauma in brief, lyric poems of dazzling craft. "Now each day is clerestory,/ each night a palimpsest of scars," she writes. Stein's favorite part of speech is the noun; the list, her preferred form: "I want to write my lover a poem/ but a very bad one. It'll include/ a giant squid and some loose change// and cuff links and two blue ferries chugging/ headfirst on the East River." Eye and ear delight in Stein's imaginative diction. Imagining herself "turned to swan" at the post-office, the speaker addresses fellow customers: "I hereby/ lend you my ascension./ In my numb and glorious/ profusion I enfold you/ and your piglet grief." However, as the poems accumulate, readers may wonder to what end the poet is employing her significant powers. Darkness lurks beneath the shimmering language, but is often only hinted at: "another body comes/ a grown man, all smiles/ and cigarettes/ and offering. I still dream/ that the red-haired boy held my head/ under water/ to spare me what the man did." Stein's poems trace a deep pain, yet rely so heavily on technical mastery and special effects that the reader may have difficulty connecting with the collection's beating heart.
