Endurance by Melissa Madenski

Oregonian http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2015/04/melissa_ma-
denskis_poems_of_lig.html

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

These are poems in a musical key rarely encountered but indelibly remembered: buoyant grief. How else to explain how poem after poem manages to lament with honest courage the attrition of survival, yet remain buoyant as a dipper bird in the unrelenting avalanche of the falls? This writer has learned to recognize a kind of rugged happiness in the clamor of the everyday. These poems are chiseled from hurt into rhythms to burn gentle in your heart and mind.

–Kim Stafford, author of: The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft

“Things get complicated” Madenski writes. And within the stacking years of life plans gone their own way, a story writes itself. “…a story’s evolution/is all about faith,” she writes, even light, to counterbalance the dark, the found to counterbalance the loss–not to make up for it, not to make everything uncomplicated, but existing to be noticed, the crack in the door, where the rest of the day, and a life, seeps in. Madenski’s grace and unadorned depth in her writing is masterful and moving, well past the reading, beyond words.
–Kirsten Rian, author of: Kalashnikov in the Sun and Waltz in Mars Time

The “liminal spaces” of Melissa Madenski’s collection locates the reader at those impermanent thresholds with the poet—between before and after, between grief and healing, between companionship and wilderness, between gritty streets and lit sky, between staying and flying away.
–Jerri Elliott Otto, author of Strange Country and What’s Inside

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]