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.

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ISBN: 9781556595295

Format: Paperback

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I want to write my lover a poem
but a very very bad one. It will include
a giant squid and some loose change

and cufflinks and two blue ferries chugging
headfirst on the East River at twenty-six knots
and only at the last minute averting

disaster through quick thinking and sure reflexes. Also
a bow and arrow and glossy red apple
I perch in front of my heart. To be honest

my lover doesn’t like poetry
which I guess is why I plan to write
such a bad one, so he can feel right

and strong and good in his beliefs.
Tonight when I go see my lover
he’ll hold me as I’ve never been held

except by him and then I’ll have to give him
back. When you get new things
you treat them like glass for a while

and then get used to them
and manhandle them
like everything else.

I don’t want to give him back
but partly it’s not up to me
and partly I don’t want to be his

old sofa. I want to radiate and gleam
arrestingly until the certain, premature
end. You can compose a whole life

out of these rollercoasters.
You can be everywhere
and nowhere, over and over

life slapping you in the face
till you’re newly burnished
flat-out gasping and awake.

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