Melissa Crowe is the author of
Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in the
Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Four Way Review, POETRY, and
Thrush, among other journals. She coordinates the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches courses in poetry and publishing.
INTRODUCTION
Certainly there are things I wish my younger self didn’t have to wait so long to discover about writing that emotional power lies, so often, in the most unassuming, daily, and personal of details; that compression is a superpower; that formal constraint can give rise to freedom, sometimes (almost paradoxically) by limiting the field of choices, sometimes by forcing a revelation the freest verse would let us avoid. Honestly, though, I think my young self might have some things to tell