On Dream Street
Melanie Almeder is in love with things and the names of things: A bag caught in a bare tree./Wires. Stand of evergreen. Snow, as well as Sweet Gum, Saw Palmetto, Sumac, White Ash. In these poems, dreams are not cloudy wisps of casual reverie, but the specific and vivid landscapes of our real night times, by turns exhilarating and dispiriting. Almeders is an almost pantheist world, stuffed to overflowing (I loved an entire city as full up as a jar), a world in which rivers, mountains, and trains are all alive, willful and always wanting more. She gathers all the junk from all/the junkyards in town and names it Eden; these poems make the name stick.""Reginald Shepherd""Again and again, Melanie Almeders lines show themselves urgently alert to the world with a rhythm all their own, one in which 'the Atlantic mutters up a waste of dead skeletons' or the poet can announce: 'I was a catch in the throat of loneliness./Now, the creak in the trees// when the wind leaks through them. /Now the sweet field in a riot of seed.' ('On Dream Street').  In these magnificent poems, its as if Emily Dickinsons compression and intelligence were stretched out over a longer, sinuous line that wraps around itself and searches out significance in observations rendered so intense they transform into vision.""Gregory Orr""Like an acrobat fearlessly singing an aria, Melanie Almeder makes a rare debut with her first collection of poems,On Dream Street.  Here she croons her irrepressible music, luring the lyric poem back to its sources in canticle and nocturne. Almeder strikes a balance of exquisite contradictions, making her lines at once sinewy, but sharp, whimsical, but elegiac. Brava for this poets luscious voiceshe seems to seize every word in the ecstasy of its bloom.""Molly Peacock""Magnificently loopy and loving, Poem for the Man Who Does Not Answer the Phone was my introduction to Melanie Almeders work. She has included it here, in her début collection that brings to the glad attention of us all her distinctive, ironic voice, noticing eye, poetic leaps, and fantastic freeform narratives. Talking to the man who doesn't pick up, she could be telling us all to get out of bed // and see the reasons to love. Her book is a wake-up call for every one of us.""Kelly Cherry--Review