https://www.melissadickey.com/news daily 0.75 2023-09-14 https://www.melissadickey.com/news/peaks-progress-cztp5 monthly 0.5 2023-09-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64ee2080cc95473ac3f0ead5/495cadd7-a93e-4f74-b97c-38432290926f/IMG-4765.JPG News - New Website https://www.melissadickey.com/books daily 0.75 2025-07-17 https://www.melissadickey.com/books/glclz5ot7tty983p1gn8vefupl1bsz monthly 0.5 2025-07-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64ee2080cc95473ac3f0ead5/a7574dd1-119e-4f10-95a5-46cd5d916a8f/OE_cover.png Books - Ordinary Entanglement - PURCHASE ORDINARY ENTANGLEMENT Received 2024 ”Honors” in Poetry from the Massachusetts Book Award, Massachusetts Center for the Book Interview at Exclamation’s Gauntlet Review at New Pages In Ordinary Entanglement, Melissa Dickey creates a shifty, self-questioning syntax, a consciousness searching for steady footing on a dying planet in a society beset with racism, economic inequality, and patriarchy. As readers, we too become webbed in these unspooling meditations that weigh pleasure and love for one’s own kin against our duty to not look away from suffering. “I felt happy wondered if happy // was okay to feel in the oceanic field / of the fucked world it’s dark lovely in here.” Even in the depths of doubt, Ordinary Entanglement sparks with moments of beauty, a child playing a toy saxophone, a blooming catalpa tree, the everyday miracles that serve as both ballast and buoy. EMILY PÉREZ To read Ordinary Entanglement is to be driven forward by lines both measured and wild. The hero of these poems—mother, teenage daughter, lover—is “holding a rope,” an umbilical cord of sorts, tethering her to the world. But in Dickey’s long, rapturous poems, all is woven together to form a different sort of rope, one tied to a bucket and lowered down into a well. Sustaining waters, it turns out, are found in the ordinary and the extraordinary, in entanglement and differentiation. In the spirit of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Dickey attends to both what is happening on in the periphery and what is happening internally. This book knows that “everything possible stretched on the rim / [is] about to become whatever there is.” SASHA STEENSEN Melissa Dickey’s poems sing in defiance—and perhaps celebration—of a slowly burning, ever spinning world. “A gauge,” the poet suggests, and indeed they offer not a fixed point so much as the lights in the aisle that will lead you in the event of an emergency to the nearest exit. Dickey does not deny the violence we inherit but offers a song to gird us against what else might come. Simply put, these lines shine. ABIGAIL CHABITNOY Ordinary Entanglement is an inquiry into the perimeters of the self. This is a book of proximity: to violence, desire, oppression, messes, resilience, and restlessness. With candor, quiet philosophy, and a lyric disorientation that enacts the porousness of selfhood, these poems weigh the responsibilities and possibilities of being the main character in one’s own story. And they exist inside an essential human question—can interiority withstand the necessity/fact of being permeated, of permeating? SARA WAINSCOTT In their restless appetite to love what is difficult, these searching poems refuse false binaries of chronicle versus critique, witness versus actor, the life of the body versus the life of the mind. With empathy and discernment, Dickey invites everything in, “awe to ember tether to slack,” as she explores what it means to be “a citizen of the world and also / this room.” Reading Ordinary Entanglement feels like coming upon a river coursing just at the upper limits of its banks: swift, swirling, and carrying so much with it as it furiously kisses the edge between chaos and control. LISA OLSTEIN https://www.melissadickey.com/books/dragons monthly 0.5 2023-09-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64ee2080cc95473ac3f0ead5/a1f3ce1f-a4dc-49e8-9361-62a23d466423/dragons-cover.jpeg Books - DRAGONS - PURCHASE DRAGONS Melissa Dickey’s rending and sparely lyric second collection, Dragons, moves in five exacting suites. Or should we call them acts? These long poems are cobbled between self and selves, in the fleshed halo of space that separates even the closest kin: cousin and cousin, mother and child, husband and wife. The speaker, though often an actor in someone else’s scene, moves keenly aware of the agency in devotion, on which the rest depends: “I did what they said: Hold your baby. Give her a kiss. I did what they said I did what they said I did.” Dickey shows us life in flickers, and the beauty and terror of these poems stream by in potent, portentous moments: “He says I should be worried/ about the dragons in the White House./ He says I should be worried/for my children./ Don’t you love that baby more than anything else in the world?/ I said: There are good dragons and bad dragons.” Selected Praise and Reviews * Kelsi Vanada reviews Dragons for Entropy * Review of Dragons in Maudlin House * Review of Dragons in The Adirondack Review “Wonderfully small and charming, Dickey’s poems articulate moments over longer, extended narratives, from the short lyric poem to the lyric fragment accumulating into sequences, and her sequences move delicately from moment to moment, point to point. . . . There is such a physicality to her poems; an immediacy and an intimacy and a precision that requires slowness, even a deep attention. Hers is an attentiveness to moments so often passed over, unspoken or otherwise unexplored, for what can’t help but be, at first, an incredibly powerful and foreign space: “Closed my skirt with a butterfly pin, hung shoes on the clothesline. Lemon tree. Mortar, brick. In the photo, a goat’s teats dangle, bell collar around the neck. Why does pregnancy look so pathetic. And this man, a tree the way he stands. Basil grown from dusty ground. The wall that seems to ripple, bulge. How much am I censored, how much predetermined. What kind of what is hanging, how.” (“Daybook”)” — Rob McLennan “Dragons encapsulates the potency of modern womanhood, with its fearsome potentiality and its perceived limits, and dances between outside expectations and personal desires: I did what they said: *Hold your baby. Give her a kiss.* I did what they said I did what they said I did. Dickey’s narrations teem with doubt, with need, with awareness of the roles that women are supposed to play and with hope that those limits are not binding. The exquisite yearning in these lines, coupled with their occasional brutality, makes this an emotionally challenging, and always rewarding, collection.” — Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword https://www.melissadickey.com/books/the-lily-will monthly 0.5 2023-09-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64ee2080cc95473ac3f0ead5/e3090834-494d-49ab-b968-28390b100a54/the-lily-will-cover.jpg Books - THE LILY WILL PURCHASE THE LILY WILL Oblique, intelligent, and sad, The Lily Will introduces readers to a voice beautifully sustained through compressed lyrics and long, meticulous sequences. The geography of this book is one of thistles and ice, love flashed with fear, and frail bodies seeking safety in heavy weather. In its warped miniatures (here an eye, there a red leaf, seen distended through iced glass) there is a commitment to smallness, vulnerability marked by precision, and intimations, too, of the eternal: “What is earthly?/ Any impulse to paradise.” Selected Praise and Reviews * Virginia Konchan reviews The Lily Will in Barn Owl Review “Melissa Dickey’s The Lily Will, an unassuming book “bound in a square and barely larger than your hand” assumes a large answer to a profound question: “What is earthly? Any impulse to paradise.” Fragility, mundanity, and a focus towards minimalism define and permeate each of these poems as they struggle to break into something grander, more ethereal, more paradisiacal. Dickey focuses on quiet places, or moods, in the hope that such effort may explode such simple vistas into comprehensive understanding. This transcendent desire from the mundane may also manifest itself in a desperate light at times, as if Dickey demands or begs significance from her environment’s subtleties: “I wish I was so mystical as to be moved/ by you, behind me, singing.// No, the factual reaction is not free/ of desire. When I look at hills/ I expect ruins…This is the hour of lust…When you share a bed you find/ other ways of hiding.” — Benjamin Baumbach, Little Village Mag https://www.melissadickey.com/contact daily 0.75 2025-05-12 https://www.melissadickey.com/work daily 1.0 2026-03-04 https://www.melissadickey.com/work/writing monthly 0.5 2023-09-14 https://www.melissadickey.com/work/events monthly 0.5 2026-03-04 https://www.melissadickey.com/work/about monthly 0.5 2026-01-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64ee2080cc95473ac3f0ead5/e58b0dd8-da52-4126-bd6f-c32282718f73/author+photo.JPG https://www.melissadickey.com/work/news monthly 0.5 2023-09-14 https://www.melissadickey.com/work/contact monthly 0.5 2023-09-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64ee2080cc95473ac3f0ead5/cf5cd2d6-4add-4c7e-82b0-4f22a270b274/IMG-4732.JPG https://www.melissadickey.com/work/books monthly 0.5 2023-09-14