Rough Honey

by Melissa Stein, Mark Doty (Introduction)

Overview

Selected by Mark Doty from over one thousand manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Melissa Stein's debut Rough Honey is a startling, sensuous collection that examines the deep sources of art. These poems speak of fragility and power, the contradictions of pleasure, and 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 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 the hope of true connection, of home.

From "Want Me":

Lemons crystallized in sugar, glistening
on a blue-glazed plate. The rarest volume
bound in blood leather. A silk carpet
woven so finely you can't push a needle through,
that from one edge is the silver of a leaf

underwater, and from the other bleu lumiere,
first frost on the cornflowers. A duet for cello
and woodsmoke, violin and icicle. Tangle of
black hair steeped in sandalwood, jasmine,
bergamot and vetiver and jewelled
with pomegranate seeds . . .

Melissa Stein's poems have appeared in leading literary journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2009, New England Review, and The American Poetry Review. She lives in San Francisco.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780977639595
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	10/05/2010
Series:	APR Honickman 1st Book Prize
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Melissa Stein: Melissa Stein won the APR/Honickman Prize with her debut volume Rough Honey. Her poems have appeared in leading literary journals and anthologies such as Best New Poets 2009, New England Review, and The American Poetry Review. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Djerassi, Montalvo, and Ragdale, among others. She lives in San Francisco.

Editorial Reviews

“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. They are rough as a hound’s tongue; they are honey itself. 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

“In her piercing debut collection, in language that is seductively alert and textured enough to evoke rarely contemplated worlds, Melissa Stein appraises splendor and terror with a lyricism that feels dangerous and original. Such a passionate vision deserves our attention. I am thrilled to see through her eyes.” —Major Jackson

“Melissa Stein writes with the intoxicating energy of one of those ancient priestesses called Melissae and yet her art is as carefully honed as that of the craftworkers who carved the goddesses’ altars. Sweet with language, tough with skill, Rough Honey is a stunning poetic debut.” —Sandra Gilbert

“Early in her fine first book, Melissa Stein demonstrates her linguistic verve, her ability to compress and enliven language so that we're compelled to pay attention. But what I especially admire is this: as the poems become more expansive in both form and content, they do so without losing their high-level sensuous energy.” —Stephen Dunn

From the Publisher