Lynn Melnick
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Founder of saferLIT & NYPL Cullman Fellow!
Landscape With Sex and Violence is vital reading for the #MeToo movement.
—San Francisco Chronicle [A] fierce new collection ... It would be easy to call these poems brave, tough, and angry but fairer to say that Melnick has gone beyond to a cool, critical assessment of moments that define women's lives. —Library Journal |
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik (forthcoming 2022), Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), &
If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, & the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, & A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in air/light, Los Angeles Review of Books, ESPN, & the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, & previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University & the 92Y. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles & currently lives in Brooklyn. Twitter: @LynnMelnick 
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Marvelous … Please Excuse This Poem comes billed as a book for younger readers; hence, its low price tag. This is part of the sneaky power of the collection, which recognizes that poems are for readers of all ages, that it is not age but intention, empathy, clarity that counts. —David Ulin, LA Times Incisive and occasionally brash, the selected works by these poets on the rise showcase the challenges of 21st-century living for readers who are ready for them. —Kirkus Reviews |
In Landscape with Sex and Violence, Melnick writes in part to show rape culture as unambiguous, to reveal misogyny’s normalization as absurd, and to defy those who ask about a victim’s 'role in the incident.' But she mines complexity by grounding these poems in the survivor’s mental strategies... Melnick represents two related dimensions of rape culture: that it is a constant feature of the world in which one lives, and that it changes the way one sees that world. —Boston Review 
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photo by Kathy Rice