These poems trace the speaker’s emotional biography from a wild and impoverished rural childhood through tender and terrifying adulthood. Rooted in the heart and the messy organs of our mortality, Melissa Crowe’s work is epistolary in tone but gritty in texture. She reckons with the pure pain and buoyant beauty of survival, loss, parenthood, and letting go. These deeply personal poems embrace the hurt that accompanies intimacy and insist that we love fiercely.

Melissa Crowe is a poet and author of the chapbooks Cirque du Crève-Coeur and Girl, Giant. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, and Literary Mama. She is a coeditor of Beloit Poetry Journal and the coordinator of University of North Carolina Wilmington’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.