Through My Eyes by Melissa Grossman

Melissa Grossman’s poetry takes hold of your heart, threading the light and dark of her life, pulling you through the intimate and familial with treasured ease, always sustaining an authentic, insightful voice.  “Through My Eyes” is great pleasure to read and savor.

–Doraine Poretz

Melissa Grossman writes about memory through an honest and emotionally unsparing series of 25 beautiful, deeply personal poems that show how memory works, how it moves through us and lives with us once we have experienced the trials and joys that life is made of. These poems are full of perception and understanding as she travels through her childhood into adulthood with people who helped shape who she is. She ignites our senses with sounds and smells and imagery, and with similes and metaphors that show her power as a writer and as an empathic woman. It is easy and very moving to trust her eyes and her wonderful precision of language as she takes us on a journey of interactions with all their comforts and surprises and without ever flinching from the difficulties that fill us all.

–Jan Wesley

Many of these poems are short and deceptively simple. The language is straightforward, often child-like. Melissa Grossman lifts moments from memory like silver minnows: shining, barely there before they slip away and become shadow… Love, pain, loss, and deep compassion, delicately painted and illuminated like stained glass. The gift of Melissa Grossman’s collection is to share not only these memories but to have a new appreciation for one’s own.

–Sandra Hunter