Girl, Giant by Melissa Crowe

With a language-lust reminiscent of Plath, Melissa Crowe swears fidelity, swears devotion to everyone she loves–husband, daughter, brother, rowdy uncles–against whatever losses life (or death) might toss their way. The language in these poems flies high like an aerialist swinging out across the abyss. Sometimes the poems clown. Sometimes they stick their head in the lion’s mouth, and aware of those dark jaws, they sing their fierce love all the more. It’s a thrilling performance.

–Betsy Sholl, former Maine Poet Laureate and author of Rough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009)

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Always searching, “hurtling to clasp / hands,” the poems in Girl, Giant probe with a voice that is at once plainspoken and capable of saying nearly anything. These poems will surprise you in a dozen ways, then hit the planet they were aiming for all along, just as it spins into view.

–Christian Barter, author of In Someone Else’s House (BkMk Press, 2013)

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Melissa Crowe has given us the gift of poems that are at once gentle and unflinchingly genuine, that manage to soothe us even as they unsettle. Girl, Giant offers in sensual, unexpected language insights into the intimate struggles and triumphs, the back-sliding and maybe-gaining-a-toehold that we know to be true of self and family. Uncles, lovers, mothers, orphans, and teenagers all come together under the circus tent of this wonderfully vibrant book, and just like any carnival, Crowe’s poems invite us to contemplate the intersections of the sacred and the profane, rational and irrational, child and adult. At these authentically ambiguous places, where pockets are “full of flowers/and stones,” we encounter hungers that can be joyfully satisfied, and yearnings that must be resolutely left behind. This is a poetry of resiliency, and as such it’s a hard-won, affirming “…hymnal,//something to sing when ghosts crowd the foot/of our bed.”

–Rachel Contreni Flynn, author of Tongue, winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award, Red Hen Press

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]