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Landscape with Sex and Violence
The poems in Landscape with Sex and Violence explore what it means to exist within a rape culture so entrenched that it can’t be separated from the physical landscapes in which it enacts itself. Lyrically complex and startling—yet forthright and unflinching— these poems address rape, abortion, sex work, and other subjects frequently omitted from male-dominated literary traditions, without forsaking the pleasures of being embodied, or the value of personal freedom, of moonlight, and of hope. Throughout, the topography and mythology of California, as well as the uses and failures of language itself, are players in what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, and a trauma survivor in contemporary America.
112 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2017
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224 people want to read
About the author
Lynn Melnick
13 books67 followersLynn Melnick is the author of the memoir, I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton, from the University of Texas Press's American Music Series/Spiegel & Grau Audio (October 2022). The paperback is available now from Spiegel & Grau.
She is also the author of three poetry collections, Refusenik (2022), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015).
Her work has appeared in APR, LA Review of Books, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, A Public Space, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture.
She has received grants from the Cafe Royal Cultural Society and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and Princeton University. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.
She is also the author of three poetry collections, Refusenik (2022), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015).
Her work has appeared in APR, LA Review of Books, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, A Public Space, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture.
She has received grants from the Cafe Royal Cultural Society and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and Princeton University. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 16, 2017
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1936919559/...
These poems take an unwavering look at rape and rape culture. Tense and beautiful they do not allow us to avert our gaze and Melnick shares her purpose from the first:
"I didn't emerge well-trained into this savage vista/because all the houseplants were succulent, and,/while anyone could witness rot writ all over my blighted arrangement,/no one stepped in."
Melnick asks us in as witness to sexual assault and we travel the terrain of rape and its survival. She explores the damage and the violence, the insistence of the memory which is never memory quite and instead ever-present, palpable, triggering.
“She walks past the hospital where they long since took her chart/and used it to wipe between their legs/the hospital where no one remembers her/now that the worst thing/that ever happened to her happened/in the last century.”
Here is a book which dares to disturb and to shake loose the shared trauma of women. At a time when the collective of women and other victims literally implore their institutions to find and serve justice to their rapists and to eradicate the culture of rape that enables them from its rotten head to its fishy body. Landscape with Sex and Violence is what art does when it makes stunning, relevant, social commentary. This book is beautiful in its telling and brutal in its delivery of the truth. Read it and weep.
These poems take an unwavering look at rape and rape culture. Tense and beautiful they do not allow us to avert our gaze and Melnick shares her purpose from the first:
"I didn't emerge well-trained into this savage vista/because all the houseplants were succulent, and,/while anyone could witness rot writ all over my blighted arrangement,/no one stepped in."
Melnick asks us in as witness to sexual assault and we travel the terrain of rape and its survival. She explores the damage and the violence, the insistence of the memory which is never memory quite and instead ever-present, palpable, triggering.
“She walks past the hospital where they long since took her chart/and used it to wipe between their legs/the hospital where no one remembers her/now that the worst thing/that ever happened to her happened/in the last century.”
Here is a book which dares to disturb and to shake loose the shared trauma of women. At a time when the collective of women and other victims literally implore their institutions to find and serve justice to their rapists and to eradicate the culture of rape that enables them from its rotten head to its fishy body. Landscape with Sex and Violence is what art does when it makes stunning, relevant, social commentary. This book is beautiful in its telling and brutal in its delivery of the truth. Read it and weep.
February 24, 2019
There were a few poems that knocked me off my feet—brilliant and reverberating and speaking in the universal-yet-first-person cry that I anticipated from a Landscape to the female experience (“She’s Going To Do Something Amazing”, “Some Ideas For Existing In Public”, “Landscape With Clinic And Oracle”).
But many poems felt homogenous, repetitive, even ending on the same number of lines or with much the same ending punch. I get it—this is the reality of our collective experience, the reality of the unique experiences of some. But I wanted to see a little more ventured in those parts.
Overall, a worthy and important read. Down to specifics, I might only highlight a few.
But many poems felt homogenous, repetitive, even ending on the same number of lines or with much the same ending punch. I get it—this is the reality of our collective experience, the reality of the unique experiences of some. But I wanted to see a little more ventured in those parts.
Overall, a worthy and important read. Down to specifics, I might only highlight a few.
January 22, 2024
Melnick's poems in Landscape with Sex and Violence are powerful, devastating, and also surprisingly funny. That element of surprise and nuance keeps the reader poised, unsure of what will strike them-- word choice, a sudden shift in pacing, repetition. This may also keep readers from fully engaging with the work. There was a lot to process, and because of that I may have come away with a shallow reading on my first go through. Though I was unsure where to begin, I do know that I will revisit these poems and will likely again find myself surprised.
March 22, 2020
This collection of poems is in my top three list for sure, my favorite of the poems being “Landscape With Fog and Fencepost”——“I hear you in the kitchen assembling soup from plastic” is just such a great line! These poems are beautiful read little by little, but if you read them in their entirety, they read like a book would; beginning, middle, end. Recommend highly and frequently to all lovers of words and syntax.
June 9, 2021
"She passes each of the neat houses with red shingles
near the hospital in the posh part of town
and as she moves further away
the shingles take on an ashen color
the color of steak when it first starts
to move beyond bloody
It’s the color of the newly dying, is what she’s trying to say.
It’s the color of the world with all the bodies dying."
From “She’s Going to Do Something About It"
near the hospital in the posh part of town
and as she moves further away
the shingles take on an ashen color
the color of steak when it first starts
to move beyond bloody
It’s the color of the newly dying, is what she’s trying to say.
It’s the color of the world with all the bodies dying."
From “She’s Going to Do Something About It"
June 24, 2020
This work by Melnick has left me struck. The narrative movement took me into a journey of empathy that was deeply eye opening. The form creates an intimacy that kept me holding my breath. Melnick's use of adjusting syntaxes helps maintain pacing. Just a really beautiful book.
August 3, 2020
Kind of like a puzzle, the poems individually sometimes confused me. But they all fit together and the weird edges and odd patterns make sense as a whole. (I've been doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles during this here pandemic.)
February 20, 2023
"But all I had hoped for was that you'd/ convince me I'm more than just a body// while I moan you can't leave handprints on my throat."
A devastating look at the ways sexual violence is omnipresent in America.
A devastating look at the ways sexual violence is omnipresent in America.
August 27, 2018
3.5-4 some of these poems absolutely throttled me, others sank a little to deeply into their own ambiguity
March 26, 2020
brilliant, brilliant, brilliant
July 24, 2023
This book, about rape and violence and how scary it is to be a woman in this country or anywhere, is stunning and brutal. It moved me deeply.
March 1, 2024
lmao the actual f was this
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews