Regina O'Melveny is a writer and assemblage artist whose award-winning poetry and prose can be found in various literary magazines including The Bellingham Review, rattapallax, Barrow Street, and The Sun. Her long poem, Fireflies, the Conflux Press Poetry Award winner, was issued as an artist's book designed by Tania Baban. She has published three chapbooks, New and A Secret from Conflux Press, and most recently, other gods, an award-winning collection from the Munster International Poetry Centre in Ireland. Her full-length manuscript, Blue Wolves, won the Bright Hill Press poetry book award. Little, Brown and Company published her novel, The Book of Madness and Cures, listed as one of six best historical novels of the year 2012 by NPR. She has taught writing at Marymount College, the Palos Verdes Art Center and the South Coast Botanic Gardens. Regina lives with her husband in the fragrant sage-scrub hills of Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Books by Regina O'Melveny:

Other poems on the web by Regina O'Melveny:
Four poems

About The Shape of Emptiness:

"The intense, compelling poems in The Shape of Emptiness by Regina O'Melveny, carry the reader through a cycle of sorrow to joy, death to life. The lyrical journey begins as the poet faces her feelings of loss and abandonment when her father leaves the family and later dies, still estranged from his daughters. A separation which dissolves all the history laid down in layers. But the poet finds improbable ways we all hold together. For her, the natural world, as carefully and eloquently described by her as it would be by a scientist, becomes her refuge, becomes how she holds together through her father's death and her mother's mental illness. All winter long the white roots/will spread and finger the way. In the final section of the book, she finds her 'Lantern of Air' in the creation of her own family, thus closing the circle in the joy of deep connection with her husband and her daughter. My ear to his chest/clenched heart unclenches."
—Grace Grafton

"With an eye that misses nothing, but reveres everything it finds without turning aside, Regina O'Melveny's newest book offers us a poetry that sings our all-too-palpable common mystery, where each thing given, shapes the emptiness of its beginning and its end. The naming of things as they truly are combines with the music in these poems to score what it feels like to walk this blessed earth as a wise and sometimes grieving companion who has the rare capacity to express in all circumstances what weds us to this world: the need and desire to love."
—Peter Levitt

"The language of these poems creeps so close to the natural world it gets entangled in it and soon we are also submerged in harsh truth and ultimate beauty. Here, in The Shape of Emptiness, life crackles and death comes alive. This book is true medicine. Drink deeply. Take it in. Yes."
—Deena Metzger