Refusenik

In this searing new volume Lynn Melnick dives head-first through concentric waves of personal and generational trauma with her trademark fearlessness. Evincing a complex mind shaped by the late 20th century's misplaced priorities Refusenik interrogates misogyny and anti-Semitism across time and a shifting global landscape-from a football field in Los Angeles to a Russian shtetl to a beloved daughter's Brooklyn bedroom. Variously unraveling and allowing for intricate tangles of anger nostalgia and love these agile poems furrow deeper into the terrain of Melnick's much-celebrated earlier titles arriving at a profound and pressured understanding of what it means to be a contemporary American.?LYNN MELNICK is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik (2022) Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017) and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012) all with YesYes Books and the coeditor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking 2015). I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma Persistence and Dolly Parton is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022.