Terrible blooms

Melissa Stein

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.

ISBN: 9781556595295

Format: Paperback

About the Author

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collections Terrible blooms (Copper Canyon Press, 2018) and Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty and published by The American Poetry Review in association with Copper Canyon Press. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Harvard Review, New England Review, The American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, The Southern Review, and others. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the …

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Reviews

“[Melissa Stein’s] sentences are beautifully choreographed; they start and stop the motion of her poems with a nearly invisible, effortless authority.” —Mark Doty

“So many of the striking (and bee-haunted) images in Melissa Stein’s fine first book, Rough Honey, ultimately reflect on the honey of words… Here Ms. Stein reminds us that there is no honey—rough, or otherwise—without the sting.” —New York Times

“[Melissa Stein’s] electric apprehensions throb with this nearly preverbal knowing. They are rough as a hound’s tongue; they are honey itself… Stein is a new poet of the first order.” —Molly Peacock