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Rough Honey
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Nominated for the Northern California Book Award, winner of an Eric Hoffer Award honorable mention, shortlisted for the da Vinci Eye Award, and runner-up for the New York Book Festival Poetry Award.
Rough Honey in the New York Times!
Rough Honey makes the top 10 in The Believer's reader survey of favorite poetry books of 2010!
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, from the Introduction
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
So many of the striking (and bee-haunted) images in Melissa Stein's fine first book, Rough Honey, ultimately reflect on the honey of words wrought by poets in their work: "the taste of your tongue/in your mouth is the only poem" and "Pardon the bee who drowns in her own honey" . . . Here Ms. Stein reminds us that there is no honey—rough, or otherwise—without the sting. — The New York Times
Rough Honey is marvelous and richly peopled. There's a whole village of voices in it, voices of men, women, voices of past generations, of butcher's daughters and marriageable girls—and I say "village" because so many of Stein's poems are set in rural landscapes—farmsteads, orchards, crop fields. So much of her focus is on the natural world, a world that almost has no whiff of the industrial, or suburban, a world which may be in its first state, rawer than ours, almost purer in its exigencies, where our primal and passionate urges can make their untethered presences felt. For after all, this is a book about desire, in all its consequential power to undo or uplift, to wrack with pleasure or regret. It is a book that places us on an earth that is sometimes rough and unyielding, but also one that gives forth "torrents of wheat," that bursts forth "masses of flowers." — Gregory Djanikian
Melissa Stein writes with the intoxicating energy of one of those ancient priestesses called Melissae and yet her art is as carefully honed as that of the craftworkers who carved the goddesses’ altars. Sweet with language, tough with skill, Rough Honey is a stunning poetic debut. — Sandra Gilbert
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, from the Introduction
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
So many of the striking (and bee-haunted) images in Melissa Stein's fine first book, Rough Honey, ultimately reflect on the honey of words wrought by poets in their work: "the taste of your tongue/in your mouth is the only poem" and "Pardon the bee who drowns in her own honey" . . . Here Ms. Stein reminds us that there is no honey—rough, or otherwise—without the sting. — The New York Times
Rough Honey is marvelous and richly peopled. There's a whole village of voices in it, voices of men, women, voices of past generations, of butcher's daughters and marriageable girls—and I say "village" because so many of Stein's poems are set in rural landscapes—farmsteads, orchards, crop fields. So much of her focus is on the natural world, a world that almost has no whiff of the industrial, or suburban, a world which may be in its first state, rawer than ours, almost purer in its exigencies, where our primal and passionate urges can make their untethered presences felt. For after all, this is a book about desire, in all its consequential power to undo or uplift, to wrack with pleasure or regret. It is a book that places us on an earth that is sometimes rough and unyielding, but also one that gives forth "torrents of wheat," that bursts forth "masses of flowers." — Gregory Djanikian
Melissa Stein writes with the intoxicating energy of one of those ancient priestesses called Melissae and yet her art is as carefully honed as that of the craftworkers who carved the goddesses’ altars. Sweet with language, tough with skill, Rough Honey is a stunning poetic debut. — Sandra Gilbert
