For melissa christine goodrum, definitions are acts of subversive re-definings and un-definings, in lines which forcibly penetrate surfaces, sing and swiftly cross multiple layers of text/geography through a turbulent and politically aware dialogue. Her composition coils around spaces between language and thought, word and page, ink and print in spatial movements of three. The final ascension lifts the reader to an innovative/jazz-like understanding and invites alternating systems of seeing—multiple sensory actions of rising—uprising—”from death” or “from bed” or “from sitting” or “of a woman after confinement”—”against authority or for [a] common purpose”(OED uprising defs. 1, 2a, b, c & 7).
In ekphrastic poems that join word and image with the uncanny, melissa christine goodrum assembles a gallery of poem portraits—the girl, the gal, the young woman, and the wobbly bride. Corralled into stanzas or dispersed depending on their position in a cycle of transformation, the poems trace the colors and adumbrations of the female psyche. In this gallery, we read a distaff life of coronations and blood and near escapes in evocative images that work on our emotions from the outside in.
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-Erica Hunt, poet, essayist, and scholar of experimental poetry and poetics