Dear Terror, Dear Splendor

by Melissa Crowe

These poems trace the speaker’s emotional biography from a wild and impoverished rural childhood through tender and terrifying adulthood. Rooted in the heart and the messy organs of our mortality, Melissa Crowe’s work is epistolary in tone but gritty in texture. She reckons with the pure pain and buoyant beauty of survival, loss, parenthood, and letting go. These deeply personal poems embrace the hurt that accompanies intimacy and insist that we love fiercely.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2019

About the author

Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor; her poems and essays have appeared in journal like Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, and the Shallow Ends. She's co-editor of Beloit Poetry Journal and coordinator of the University of North Carolina's MFA program in creative writing.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t want this book of poetry to end. I wanted to swallow it all at once. It’s a rare thing to find a book that, as soon as you finish, you want to immediately start over and begin again. This is that book.
So, I don’t know you, whoever is reading this review, but well, I think you’ll love this.

[Sayantani Dasgupta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a poet but I’ve read this book twice. There are poems here on family, motherhood, place, death. There’s so much haunting beauty in Crowe’s poems. Highly recommended.

[Ian Wall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to follow

[Yazmin Flores · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even after spending three years learning from the brilliance of Melissa Crowe, I am still in awe each and every time I find myself in her poems.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of poetry that weaves between the poet's past as a poor kid, to her mother dying, to finding and falling in love with her husband when she was just a teenager, to her hopes and dreams and terrors for her teenage daughter.

From Bruise: "It's almost beautiful / what the skin can do: / bloom. A stain / like a violet opening / its blue on the silk of your cheek."

From A Laying On of Hands: "Shuddering with love / and shame, I'd held a boy / inside myself the night before / and thought the same - / was it sweet or terrible"

Overall a wonderful collection, recommended.

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is tender, in that is it full of heart and blood, anger and desire. One thing that stood out to me in this book (and there are many things that Crowe does expertly, on a word-level, a line-level, and a conceptual level) is how well she writes about, well, love. Not the saccharine, romance-love we’re used to groaning over in verse. The real, blistering, terrifying, sustaining love that can warm us from within, that animates us and pulls us forward. These poems traffic in love and all its shades, and the reader is all the better for being able to experience them.

[Nichole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Melissa Crowe’s “Dear Terror, Dear Splendor” is like sitting down for a chat with that one friend who is not afraid to discuss any and every subject, no matter how uncomfortable it may make you. Her sketches of the stages of a woman’s life — from daughter, to wife, to mother — are joyful and tender, brutal and bleak, and devastatingly relatable. “Dear Terror, Dear Splendor” is a sometimes terrifying, always splendid collection.

[Melody Moezzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Dear Terror, Dear Splendor" is STUNNING! Melissa Crowe had me in the palm of her hand as a reader from the start, crying and laughing in the best possible ways. I highly recommend this smart, tender and gorgeous poetry collection.

[Layne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way Crowe talks about the fear that grips you at the human realities of family, time, and love is alive and painful in the most visceral way. She is an unblinking force across the page.

[Cari Molin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful book of poetry! Goes into depth about Crowe's familiar relationships. Emotional, vulnerable, and full of love.

[Martina Litty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread