Description
Paperback: 40 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9837904-7-1
Product Dimensions: 8-1/2 x 5-1/2 x 1/4 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.3 oz.
“In Hover the Bones, burying a miscarried child looks like planting a seed in a garden, and trimming vines feels like taking the place of a dead mother. The book’s epigraph from Audre Lorde reminds us that “we were never meant to survive,” and the final poem leaves us with a peaceful benediction: ‘May we be well. / May we be happy. / May we be free from suffering.’ Melisa Malvin-Middleton has created beauty out of darkness.”
~ Katie Manning, Founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review, and author of Tasty Other
and The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman
“These are tough, sensitive, and adamantly engaged poems that call us again and again to a vast interior complexity. Against the backdrop of personal and family history, the poems adhere to the commitment to find grace even in the face of illness and death. ‘May we be free from suffering,’ Melisa Malvin-Middleton offers quietly. This is a poet who translates turbulence with unswerving faith in language and song. She reminds us there are times when it’s simply ‘good enough to dig.’ In the face of all else that may fall down around us or away from us, I agree with her. This is an elegant debut.”
~ Leilani Hall, author of Swimming the Witch
“Melisa Malvin-Middleton’s work often obsesses with time, with the ‘what is,’ but also the ‘what once was.’ There is a sense of precious nostalgia in her poetry, but that nostalgia is always brewing with the knowledge that there is more at stake than just the act of remembering, because it carries a sense of coming loss or grief that has already arrived. Melisa’s work reminds us all of our own mortality, but more importantly, and heartbreakingly so, it reminds us of the mortality of those we love.”
~ Lusine Makarosyan