MELISSA STEIN / Rough Honey
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,
- Street:
- The Booksmith
- Additional:
- 1644 Haight Street
- City:
- San Francisco ,
- Province:
- California
- Postal Code:
- 94117
- Country:
- United States
How to Reserve a Seat for an Event in the Store
We offer limited reserved seating for anyone purchasing a copy
of an event’s featured book in advance from The Booksmith.
In the store: let us know you’d like a reserved seat
when you make your purchase prior to the event date.
By telephone: let us know you’d like a reserved seat
when you make your purchase prior to the event date.
By email: let us know you’d like a reserved seat
when you make your purchase prior to the event date.
Online: when you place your order via Booksmith.com,
add “reserved seat for talk on [date]” to the comments field.
NB: if you choose the ‘pay in store’ option, we cannot guarantee
a reserved seat. If you want to be certain to have a reserved seat,
we suggest you choose the ‘pay with credit card’ option.
In all cases, we will either confirm a reserved seat for you
or let you know that we have no more reserved seats available.
Please note this offer provides one reserved seat for each book purchased.
