NOCTILUCENT, Shearsman Books
“BUCKHEIT pairs earthly longings with writings of celestial delicacy to show us what we can see when we look beyond immediacy. Her collection, like the noctilucent cloud that shares its name, lingers long in the atmosphere.” Jocelyn Heath, LAMBDA LITERARY
HYBRID: MELISSA BUCKHEIT, Essay: A Last and First View, Connemara
Read & Experience “Essay: A Last and First View, Connemara,” published in the Fall 2020 inaugural issue of FIVES, a Companion to DENVER QUARTERLY.
“The Earth is whispering, the literal dirt is whispering, it holds close what is sweet, potent, once voluble, electric in the earth, known by peoples long ago. It will not divulge, for the land is unaltered, the stones that make the shape of each site—ruined house, cillin, ring fort, unconsecrated or consecrated cemetery, standing stone, ruined church, castle, well, passage tomb—are the same and make the land. They are not separate from it, but are the land, the people.”
READING: MELISSA BUCKHEIT, EDGE Reading Series, FABLE, CT
Watch Melissa’s performance online from her reading with Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, Abigail Chabitnoy & Trace Peterson for EDGE at FABLE.
TRANSLATION: IOULITA ILIOPOULOU, trans. MELISSA BUCKHEIT, Select Poems from Wish for Odysseas
Read & Experience “Sleep’s,” “Small Craft,” and more, by Greek poet, Ioulita Iliopoulou, trans. Melissa Buckheit, published in Waxwing Literary Journal.
“We are Greeks of Asia my love/ We are alone/ in the water, the deep of/ Louisa and the/ Stepless pearl-e-ros/ divers of little/ syllables”
CRITICAL REVIEW: MELISSA BUCKHEIT, This Is Not Fake: Who Are We, Animals, in the Anthrome? A Review of Make Yourself Happy by Eleni Sikelianos
Read & Experience “This Is Not Fake: Who Are We, Animals, in the Anthrome? A Review of Make Yourself Happy by Eleni Sikelianos, published in EOAGH.
“Before we’ve traveled anywhere, Sikelianos locates us in the anthropogenic or human biome, establishing the human altered form of our ecosystem as our current origin … It is beautiful and alive, and it is charred and decaying; so, we must walk from here to happiness, then begin again.”
READING: MELISSA BUCKHEIT, University of Arizona Poetry Center, AZ
Watch Melissa’s performance on VOCA from her reading with Karen Rigby and Anne Shaw at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
DULCET YOU, dancing girl press
“THESE poems are radically open and in love, as if words constellated an amorous ocean licking after the desert, or a desert creeping toward its beloved and necessary water.” Eleni Sikelianos
READING: MELISSA BUCKHEIT, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, NY
Listen to Melissa’s performance online from her reading with Sueyeun Juliette Lee at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop.
POEMS: MELISSA BUCKHEIT, Catalogue: Unusual Symmetry & Anti-Erasure: Haunt/Home
Read & Experience “Catalogue: Unusual Symmetry” and “Anti-Erasure: Haunt/Home,” published in Molly Bloom.
“Show yourself/ spiny, globular animal/ who inhabits all zones/ intertidal to 5,000 metres deep/ round and spiny across/ crawling with your tube feet–/ you eat slow moving animals/ avoid sea otters, wolf eels, and triggerfish/ as urchin is an old word,/ sea hedgehog,/ archaically”
READING: MELISSA BUCKHEIT, Grolier Poetry Book shop, Boston, MA
Watch Melissa’s performance online from her reading with Amy King for Grolier Poetry Book Shop.
TRANSLATION: IOULITA ILIOPOULOU, trans. MELISSA BUCKHEIT, Select Poems from Wish for Odysseas
Read & Experience “Before Love,” “Untrodden,” “Nothing,” and more, by Greek poet, Ioulita Iliopoulou, trans. Melissa Buckheit, published in Blue Fifth Review.
“And subtracts nothing from/ Nothing — dark from the shadow/ From Hades ai! the vow-/ ELS”
