In Melissa Balmain's "Walking in on People, " the serious is
lightened with a generous serving of wit and humor, and the
lighthearted is enriched with abundant wisdom. She shows us how
poetry can be fun yet grounded in everyday challenges and triumphs,
with subjects ranging from the current and hip ("Facebook" posts,
online dating, layoffs, retail therapy, cell-phone apps, trans
fat), to the traditional and time-tested (marriage, child-rearing,
love, death). Through it all, her craft is masterful, with a formal
dexterity deployed with precision in a showcase of forms such as
the villanelle, ballad, triolet, nonce, and the sonnet. It is
little wonder then that "Walking in on People" is the winner of the
2013 Able Muse Book Award, as selected by the final judge, X.J.
Kennedy. This is a collection that will not only entertain
thoroughly, but also enlighten and reward the reader.
PRAISE FOR WALKING IN ON PEOPLE:
"Walking in on People" grabbed me with its very title, and it
never let go. Poetry these days is rarely so entertaining, so
beautifully crafted, so sharp of eye, yet so wise and warm of
heart. Melissa Balmain keenly perceives faults in people and in our
popular culture, with piercing wit but never bitterness. Don't miss
the wonderful "Lament," on what it takes to write a best seller, or
"The Marital Bed," a love poem with naturalistic detail. She really
commands her art. Indeed, I think any poet who rhymes "lobsters"
and "Jersey mobsters" deserves to have an equestrian statue of
herself erected in Bangor or Newark or both.
X.J. Kennedy (Judge, 2013 Able Muse Book Award)
Melissa Balmain's poems add to the rhythmic bounce of light
verse a darker, more cutting humor. The result is an infectious,
often hilarious blend of the sweet and the lethal, the charming and
the acidic.
Billy Collins
So many of the poems in Melissa Balmain's triumphant debut lodge
themselves in that Frostian zone where they are hard to get rid of.
They recur in the mind in moments of hilarity and pathos, of
exaltation and mortification, and they never let us go.
David Yezzi (from the foreword)
Accessible and entertaining poetry doesn't often prevail over
the grim personal memoir in poetry contests, but this time the
judges were smart. They went for Melissa Balmain's stylish and
always metrically perfect wit. You can relate to this poetry if you
have ever: longed to save the restaurant lobsters from their fate,
lost your lover to his electronic devices, faced the fact that
babies are ugly and toddlers suppress your genius, or (of course)
walked in on people in all the wrong places. With diverse forms,
inventive rhymes, the right word always chosen and a sense of humor
always in evidence you really have no excuse not to buy this
book.
Gail White
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Melissa Balmain is a humorist, journalist, and teacher, and the
editor of "Light." Her poems have been published in the anthologies
"The Iron Book of New Humorous Verse" and "Killer Verse, " and in
"American Arts Quarterly, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Mezzo Cammin,
The Spectator (UK), The Washington Post, " and elsewhere. Her prose
has appeared in "The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney's,
Details, " and many other magazines and newspapers. She is a
columnist for "Success" magazine and the author of a memoir, "Just
Us: Adventures of a Mother and Daughter" (Faber and Faber). Balmain
has won national journalism honors and been a finalist for the
Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and
the X.J. Kennedy Parody Award. She teaches at the University of
Rochester and lives nearby with her husband and two children.
"Walking in on People, " the winner of the 2013 Able Muse Book
Award, is her first full-length poetry collection.
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