Puddles of An Open by Paige Melin

Charles Bernstein once argued that in a well-crafted poem, form acts as an extension of content, particularly as the subject of the work is enacted through the behavior of the language itself. Paige Melin’s writing not only utilizes hybrid forms to mirror content, but rather, form and content become seamlessly intertwined as the book unfolds. We as readers are invited into the heroine’s psyche, made to experience the beauty and terror of thought itself. Through her provocative syntactic ruptures and stream-of-consciousess narrative style, Melin subtly and gracefully interrogates the boundaries between interior and exterior, subject and object, self and world. Puddles of an Open is a stunning debut, as innovative in its technique as it is in its philosophical assertions.

—Kristina Marie Darling

Paige Melin’s literary laboratorial imaginations, Puddles of an Open, moves to expose the sociological prejudice and the political capacity inherent in dictionary words as they, these things of letters, are casually exchanged between us. Her assemblages are ensembles of a harmonious breach with the quotidian and sublime suburban poem of our time. In Melin’s ruptured poetry, compliant poetry becomes poetry of applied use, and with hope, a poetic tool for reassignment.

—Michael Basinski

[cant enter or move out of away from] Puddles of an Open occurs in a suggestively uncomfortable space between entrance and exit that is never fully within. about to be said and already retracted, Melin’s suspended [story] remains untold: as it resists coherence as representation of events, it captures instead a self-fragmenting fugitiveness in articulation. raising awareness around speaking and narration as decision – precisely by refusing this decision – Melin plays on the slipperiness of memory and the language of telling [eyes] [ice] while lingering on aporias of consent, admission, desire, and feeling besetting the underlying matters spoken of. is this a trauma or a dream (or both)? whose words are in whose mouth? [funny to awaken when youve never been sleeping] come skim with Melin along this uneven surface: seduction is a text that doesn’t give up (its secrets)…

—Judith Goldman

Poet, editor, and intersectional feminist Paige Melin is currently pursuing her M.A. in English at the University of Maine. Her writing has been published in NAME, Yellowfield, and Stolen Island, and has won awards through the Academy of American Poets and the Albert Cook, Mac Hammond, and John Logan Prize for Poetry. Along with her partner, Vincent, she co-founded and edits steel bellow: a purely Buffalo literary magazine, and she is currently the Editorial Assistant for Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 36 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-236-5

$10

Puddles of an Open by Paige… by Geoffrey Gatza