Books by Melissa Christine Goodrum

In her second poetry collection, something sweet & filled with blood, melissa christine goodrum demonstrates a growing talent. Drawing from her experience in a musical family, a deep well of feeling, and expansive knowledge of art and art history, she presents subjects ranging from Elizabeth Boott Duveneck and Susan Apthop, their true selves hidden-she might say jailed-on museum walls, to the works of artists Ronald Lokett, Manet, Degas, and Kehinde Wiley. Demonstrating facility in a variety of poetic forms, goodrum shakes up convention by imagining the inner lives and thoughts of these subjects through the lens of current day politics and issues of race and gender identity. The lively imagery throughout this new collection is fresh and inspiring.

For melissa christine goodrum, definitions are acts of subversive re-definings and un-definings, in lines which forcibly penetrate surfaces, sing and swiftly cross multiple layers of text/geography through a turbulent and politically aware dialogue. Her composition coils around spaces between language and thought, word and page, ink and print in spatial movements of three. The final ascension lifts the reader to an innovative/ jazz-like understanding and invites alternating systems of seeing-multiple sensory actions of rising-uprising-"from death" or "from bed" or "from sitting" or "of a woman after confinement"- "against authority or for [a] common purpose" (OED uprising defs.1,2a,b,c & 7).