Melissa Stein's poems have appeared in Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, North American Review, Indiana Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Djerassi Foundation. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.

Other poems by Melissa Stein in Verse Daily:
June 22, 2006:   "Trouble." " Trouble on the prairie..."

Books by Melissa Stein:

Other poems on the web by Melissa Stein:
"Olives, Bread, Honey, and Salt"
from Love Letter

Melissa Stein's Website.

About Rough Honey:

"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

"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

"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