In her debut collection, What It Was Like To Be A Woman, Melinda Wilson digs into the corporeal, political, and spiritual realities of growing up and living in a female body in the late 20th and early 21st century, and does so with a sharply nuanced feminist sensibility. In less expert hands, it might be a story we think we’ve heard before. But in poem after poem there is surprise in thought and feeling, along with vivid imagery and an attention to music that make what is difficult to feel or own a simultaneous pleasure. Wilson is especially masterful with the short lyric and the precise intensities of these pressurized forms radiate throughout this book. —Erin Belieu
Melinda Wilson’s heroically tough and vulnerable book, What It Was Like to Be a Woman, relays this very information with grit and beauty. From childhood through to the present, Wilson’s poems illustrate that under patriarchy our bodies are never our own, and the struggle to keep what’s ours ours—mind and body—is one that spans a lifetime. Throughout, however, the poet reminds us of the revelation in the everyday, and the grace found in the struggle. —Lynn Melnick
What It Was Like to Be a Woman, Melinda Wilson’s gorgeous debut, is a tour-de-force Medusa with “violet hair,” equal parts indictment and empathy. These fierce poems glitter in a sea of drowned pigtails, dried frogs, ghost crabs and “single mother fuck-ups” who will birth the same, but only if they believe the terrible stories their fathers have told them. With the sharpness and concision of Louise Glück and the candid feminist intensity of Anne Sexton, Wilson’s collection is a riveting invitation to scrutinize desire and longing on a planet where so many people are punished for their desires. —Sandra Simonds
About the Author
Melinda Wilson is the author of Amplexus, a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press. Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, The Cincinnati Review, The Minnesota Review, The Wisconsin Review, Evening Street Review, Arsenic Lobster, Diner, Maryland Literary Review and many other journals. She is a founding editor of Coldfront Magazine, and she is the Director of the Center for Academic Success and faculty at Manhattan College. She lives in Bronx, New York.
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