Melissa Dickey graduated from the University of Washington and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She teaches creative writing at Tulane University, co-edits Thermos magazine, and keeps a blog. She is from New Orleans.

Books by Melissa Dickey:

Other poems on the web by Melissa Dickey:
"Honor"

About The Lily Will:

"Melissa Dickey's astonishingly poised first book, The Lily Will, arrives with wind in its sweater to 'triumph over chit-chat.' Devoted to the huge truth of earthly things, her poems amble with exquisite, trembling clarity through a world in which 'everything has burned clear, / even the horizon.' Maybe we 'cannot say what it is like.' so what. 'Here are the fallen seeds / that could not befriend the ground,' Dickey writes, and we glimpse a potential, difficult equilibrium between our usual 'mess of outerness' and the 'invisible carilage' around us. These poems are as comprehensible as thirst, as quiet as a knife that has just nicked your ear. They are daily like each day seeing—and being hurt by seeing, and loving the hurt of seeing—that 'whether or not belief rebounds. The lily will.'"
—Zach Savich