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Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)
by Melissa Crowe
Equal parts sad, sexy, and searching, Abider opens with the central lament/brag of its lover-speaker, that she can never truly leave anything―or anyone―behind.
The origins of this abidingness are traced in odes and elegies for a rural girlhood beset with jeopardy and scarcity and neglect. But it was also good-wild, conducive to a reckless freedom she can't help grieving, even as she falls in love at sixteen and marries hard. Meanwhile, other, electric connections are painfully delimited by heteronormative expectations, and her growing dis-ease reveals that she has been trying (and failing) to heal by remaining where she is harmed. She wants―this harrowed, semi-feral girl turned unswerving woman―to stay and go at once, and the tension between her desire for connection and her wish to escape threatens her sense of self and animates these vivid, urgent, tenderhearted poems. Right on time, then, a secret third thing emerges: a final, lush and lucid sonnet sequence that culminates in a promise to abide―first, foremost, always―the self.
"Showcasing the poet's ironic best, it's a masterly volume about love, not merely abided, but embodied." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Abider by Melissa Crowe is a stirring book about circling story: 'Sometimes we make out the shape of what's coming.' In these poems of reckoned desire and survival, we move from version to version―from inventive making and unmaking, from wildness through grief through the queer body. In the midst of striking sound and muscular lines, Crowe delivers us to the 'particular hand that makes a particular mouth sing' ―to the self, to the many selves." ―Jan Beatty, author of Dragstripping
"Melissa Crowe's Abider is a coming-of-ages story of queer eros―may we always be as self-fruitful as these poems invite! Crowe's poems blossom forth into lyric multiverses, weighing many routes to remembering, losing, and sugaring. I didn't want this collection to end, nor for the speaker to choose any one route to pleasure other than abundance." ―Jenny Johnson, author of In Full Velvet
This information about Abider was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor and Lo, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and the New England Review and has been featured in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series. She was the recipient of the 2021 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and is chair of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
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