melissa christine goodrum
poet, writer, & educator
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However we interpret these enigmatic and sometimes excruciatingly painful poems, they are brilliant and beautiful. melissa christine goodrum’s something sweet & filled with blood is a new moment in language, wonderful in and of itself, and a harbinger of great things to come.
These poems seem to have subjects in which activity in a visual field arrives, as if overheard, or more precisely, overlooked—the poet does not subjugate what is seen, but in describing participates. And by this interlocution, melissa christine goodrum’s something sweet & filled with blood asserts a presence of richness in which vision, however construed, is a necessity.
—Sapphire
best-selling novelist and poet, author of Push, The Kid, and American Dreams
—Ammiel Alcalay
scholar, author, translator and recipient of the 2017 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award
melissa christine goodrum’s poems are taut, burgeoning beams of ancestors, wriggling onto the page with totems of sound—history surrounding each page.
—Tyehimba Jess
author of leadbelly
and Olio, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
definitions uprising...is a rebellion, not against meaning, but rather for multiple meanings and singings of the embodied word. These singular poems of astonishing range, create a palpable energy on the page. They are by turns mythic and shocking.
Brenda Coultas
definitions uprising is the "eye-siren" synesthesia of dream as a language, the body as words...the fully sensual lyrical reverie of an "eye-Syren" who, thankfully, "[hasn't] learned/there/is no dictionary" of the unconscious, and so draws us into her imagination of one.
Michael Whalen
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about
melissa christine goodrum first journeyed to New York City from Cambridge, Ma in 2004 to obtain a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing-Poetry from Brooklyn College. Nearly seventeen years later, her poetry can be found in The New York Quarterly, The Torch, The Tiny, Rhapsoidia, Cusp, canwehaveourballback?, Transmission, a harpy flies down (a chapbook by Other Rooms Press), Suitcase for Chrysanthemums and The Bowery Women Poems (both anthologies).
She is committed to publishing and actively participating in the poetry community wherever she may be. She has enjoyed her various leadership roles over the years: Guest Editor of Other Rooms Press’ first print anthology: Ocellus Reseau, Co-Editor of The Brooklyn Review, Designer/Publisher/Editor of Cave Canem’s Fall 2010 and 2014 NYC Workshop Collections, “Writing Down the Music” and "Letters to the Future," Co-President of the Cambridge Poetry Awards, Administrative Director of Bowery Arts & Science and as recipient of a Zora Neale Hurston Award from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
During the summer of 2016, the NEH funded her five-week adventure to the University of California in Davis to dissect the works of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. The result was a collaborative multi-media eruption at the John Natsoulas Gallery, A Political Lacunae: Verb-ing Violence into Visual.
Her first full-length book of poetry, definitions uprising, was made available in 2013, thanks to NY Quarterly Books. Urbantgarde invited her to be one voice in a five-poet anthology titled Urgent Bards. Bright Hill Press released an anthology, Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose interweaving her jazz-o-phile poetics in December, 2017. Most recently, great weather for MEDIA released her second full-length collection, something sweet & filled with blood in May of 2019.
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