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Today's poem is "Mock Orange"
from On Dream Street

Tupelo Press

Melanie Almeder was raised in Atlanta, Georgia and southern Maine. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Virginia, M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, and Ph.D. in contemporary fiction from the University of Florida. She currently teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Roanoke College and has been widely published in journals.

About On Dream Street:

"Melanie Almeder is in love with things and the names of things: ‘A bag caught in a bare tree./Wires. Stand of evergreen. Snow,’ as well as ‘Sweet Gum, Saw Palmetto, Sumac, White Ash.’ In these poems, dreams are not cloudy wisps of casual reverie, but the specific and vivid landscapes of our real night times, by turns exhilarating and dispiriting. Almeder’s is an almost pantheist world, stuffed to overflowing (‘I loved an entire city as full up as a jar’), a world in which rivers, mountains, and trains are all alive, willful and always wanting more. She gathers ‘all the junk from all/the junkyards in town’ and names it Eden; these poems make the name stick."
—Reginald Shepherd

"Again and again, Melanie Almeder’s lines show themselves urgently alert to the world with a rhythm all their own, one in which “the Atlantic mutters up a waste of dead skeletons” or the poet can announce: “I was a catch in the throat of loneliness./Now, the creak in the trees// when the wind leaks through them. /Now the sweet field in a riot of seed.” (“On Dream Street”). In these magnificent poems, it’s as if Emily Dickinson’s compression and intelligence were stretched out over a longer, sinuous line that wraps around itself and searches out significance in observations rendered so intense they transform into vision."
—Gregory Orr

"Like an acrobat fearlessly singing an aria, Melanie Almeder makes a rare debut with her first collection of poems, On Dream Street. Here she croons her irrepressible music, luring the lyric poem back to its sources in canticle and nocturne. Almeder strikes a balance of exquisite contradictions, making her lines at once sinewy, but sharp, whimsical, but elegiac. Brava for this poet’s luscious voice—she seems to seize every word in the ecstasy of its bloom."
—Molly Peacock



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