Abider

Equal parts sad, sexy, and searching, Abider opens with the central lament/brag of its lover-speaker, that she can never truly leave anything—or anyone—behind. The origins of this abidingness are traced in odes and elegies for a rural girlhood beset with jeopardy and scarcity and neglect. But it was also good-wild, conducive to a reckless freedom she can’t help grieving, even as she falls in love at sixteen and marries hard. Meanwhile, other, electric connections are painfully delimited by heteronormative expectations, and her growing dis-ease reveals that she has been trying (and failing) to heal by remaining where she is harmed. She wants—this harrowed, semi-feral girl turned unswerving woman—to stay and go at once, and the tension between her desire for connection and her wish to escape threatens her sense of self and animates these vivid, urgent, tenderhearted poems. Right on time, then, a secret third thing emerges: a final, lush and lucid sonnet sequence that culminates in a promise to abide—first, foremost, always—the self.

Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor and Lo, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and the New England Review and has been featured in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series. She was the recipient of the 2021 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and is chair of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.