Melissa Crowe is the author of
Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in the
Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Four Way Review, POETRY, and
Thrush, among other journals. She coordinates the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches courses in poetry and publishing.
INTRODUCTION
Certainly there are things I wish my younger self didn’t have to wait so long to discover about writing that emotional power lies, so often, in the most unassuming, daily, and personal of details; that compression is a superpower; that formal constraint can give rise to freedom, sometimes (almost paradoxically) by limiting the field of choices, sometimes by forcing a revelation the freest verse would let us avoid. Honestly, though, I think my young self might have some things to tell
In a hotel room in the 90s, a Japanese man hired by the Opera to repair Chinese-made violins is crouched over a mess on a grey rug, thinking: maybe I could turn these 12 violins into a house and live there until everyone knows my name. He is new to Cairo, and anonymity gnaws at his hair and bones like bugs. Across bridges and on the fringes of the desert, 12 boys wait impatiently for their instruments. The man wanders the tone-deaf streets, looking for spare parts for ancient instruments that had been crafted to work only underwater. Every time he visits a carpenter, he holds his breath, empties a large bottle of water over his head, and waits for any of the objects to make a sound. More often than not he is met with silence. Just a wet man surrounded by stunned men, their saws in the air. Once or twice, a knob or a sliver of wood launches into brief song around his dampened body. Both times he comes back to his breath, grabs the parts, and runs out. The boys coil old, worn socks int
Cream City Review,
Cosmonauts Avenue,
Foundry, and other publications. She is also an educator and the founder of The Battleground, a youth program in the Sulphur Springs neighborhood of Tampa, Florida. Her website is YukiJackson.com.