Knoxville, TN—Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of Melanie Jordan’s first full-length book, Hallelujah for the Ghosties, which is now available for purchase at the Sundress store!
“Melanie Jordan’s poems are manic escapades, full of surprising juxtapositions and freshly-minted lines that, to splice in a bit of them, ‘read as though/each word is a newborn.’ It’s not a smooth ride, and the swerves are dangerous, but readers who go for a spin with her will discover ‘a lot to see in people, the way they hover/at the edge of knowing and oblivion.’”
-Lucia Perillo, author of On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths and Inseminating the Elephant
“’I am hand-stitched / to stand witness,’ the speaker in one of Melanie Jordan’s poems tells us, and this impressive debut collection, Hallelujah for the Ghosties, is intricately wrought, woven with rare and wonderful insights. Here, the poet looks into the places we resist, finding in them clarity and beauty, isolation and community. An antebellum portico, the speed of light, the tangled hands of a couple in a museum all serve as revelations in service to Jordan’s hard-earned awareness and sudden wit. This is poetry as artifact—thoughtful, gorgeous, and seamless.”
-Adrian Matejka author of The Big Smoke
“There are many, many brilliances silking and savaging and singing their elegant and brutal way through the poems in Melanie Jordan’s terrific debut. Every poem is its own distinct river, and perhaps the most telling brilliance is the subtle, devastating power she accords each of them to utterly transport us into environs so fully realized, driven by such a curious intellect and dedicated spirit, that we wake—if we wake—from the spell of them to imagine our own real wanting…If poems are small (or large) machines made of words, then Melanie Jordan’s machines are vehicles that rescue our attention from the puerile glitter that most days passes for life and convey us, again and again, to the vital, profound stuff of matters that actually matter.”
-Marc McKee, author of Bewilderness and Fuse
Melanie Jordan‘s chapbook, Ghost Season, is available from Ropewalk Press; her work has been published in the Iowa Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poetry Southeast, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, Southeast Review, and others. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga before receiving her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and her doctorate from the University of Houston. She currently teaches Creative Writing, literature, and composition at the University of West Georgia. Hallelujah for the Ghosties is her first full-length collection.
