Events

 Rough Honey is suffused with a dark tenderness. These poems speak of fragility and power, the contradictions of pleasure, the bruises we bear. With remarkable range, they carry us from a whitewater rafting calamity to the “torrents of wheat” on a family farm; from a bathysphere’s color-starved depths to a butcher’s blood-soaked counter; from a peepshow’s “manageable storm of boredom and sex” to a passionate fall from grace in an orchard. By turns buoyant and forlorn, Rough Honey’s characters both long for and abandon hope of true connection, of home, in a world where “everything is rented.” But their struggles are rendered in language so radiant, so mellifluous, it can’t help but hint at the possibility of transcendence, the sheer sweetness in being alive.   “Rough Honey is a miracle of a first collection. Melissa Stein’s sensuous articulation of the world from the inside out puts her poems into a kind of freefall—back into a pulsing, primal language. Her electric apprehensions throb with this nearly preverbal knowing . . . Above all, they define and redefine the lyric poem, giving it myriad protean identities. Stein is a new poet of the first order.” -- Molly Peacock   “Openness—of form, and of the receptive and longing body—is Rough Honey’s central subject, and its oxymoronic title suggests the sweet and fierce character of desire, that compelling and dangerous sustenance . . . Stein’s poems are lit by a restless and flashing verbal intelligence . . . Her sentences are beautifully choreographed; they start and stop the motion of her poems with a nearly invisible, effortless authority.” -- Mark Doty, from the Introduction   Melissa Stein has published poems in The Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, Harvard Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Foundation.