The beautiful, awful reality of being female
Shortly after the release of Melissa Stein’s debut book of poetry, “Rough Honey,” her mother called. Stein’s mother, who hadn’t read much of the San Francisco poet’s writing, had just finished the book.
“She had this terribly tentative, quiet voice,” Stein recalls. “And she says, ‘I just have one question for you. All that stuff in the book — did that happen to you?’ ”
Not all of it did — Stein refers to much of her work as fictional — but the motherly concern was fair. In Stein’s new collection, “Terrible Blooms,” poems brim with oblique renderings of the unsettling. Dark and violent memories sprout up; grief pervades; animals often turn up dead or in the process. There is a pall of the terrible cast over the work.
In “Dear Columbine, Dear Engine,” a poem toward the end of the book, a variation of the situation with Stein’s mother arises in the narrator’s voice: “That could be me beneath/ a bridge. Torn up beside the road,/ a bloat of skin and fur./ Afloat in bathtub, clean,/ bluelipped, forgiven. Facedown/ in the snow. Why do you/ imagine
these terrible things?/ asks my mother, or her ghost.”
“I’ve always been attracted to the darker side of things,” Stein says in an otherwise sprightly voice that belies the raw bleakness blanketing many of her poems. Yet her images, consistently surprising and manipulated in unexpected ways, often exist alongside beauty and wonder; it’s a part of the oxymoron “Rough Honey” of the book’s title and the nature of her writing, which she says is full of contradictions.
In “Dead Things,” (the second of two poems with the same name) Stein writes, “All the dead things hurt too much./ Even the bright things breathing.”
For Stein, the duality is simply a part of the world.
“Because there are terrible things, doesn’t take away from the fact that there are magnificent things and redemptive things, and maybe makes us value them all the more,” she says.
In “Terrible Blooms,” however, images of grief or violence, whether abstract or fictional, are often nevertheless tied to a feeling of the sinisterly true — to certain, as our larger culture has seen, pervasive realities for women.
“Many of my poems depict women who are struggling to stay safe,” Stein says. “They’re struggling to find their way, they’re struggling to find their power. The poems kind of try on lots of different ways that we respond to violence, whether overt or covert. They explore what it’s like to have the very vulnerability of your body used against you.”
Yet even then, glimpses into darkness can still be juxtaposed with the bright and gleaming. In “Birthstone,” Stein opens her poem: “Facedown in carpet,/ arm pinned behind me./ Oh, opal. Oh, tourmaline./
Oh emerald of the cool, cool shade./ A jewel is buried in this/ pile I will find it with/ my teeth. … ”
Amid chaos, Stein says, a question that courses in the poems is “whether and how we can both fight and manage to stay open and conscious and kind.” Another word might be survival, not only through the terrible, but also for the life that exists beyond.
Stein reads from her new book Thursday, May 17, alongside writer C. Dale Young at Moe’s Books in Berkeley.