Landscape with Sex and Violence

Product Description

Poetry. California Interest. Women’s Studies. Domestic Abuse. The poems in LANDSCAPE WITH SEX AND VIOLENCE explore what it means to exist within a rape culture so entrenched that it can’t be separated from the physical landscapes in which it enacts itself. Lyrically complex and startling—yet forthright and unflinching—these poems address rape, abortion, sex work, and other subjects frequently omitted from male-dominated literary traditions, without forsaking the pleasures of being embodied, or the value of personal freedom, of moonlight, and of hope. Throughout, the topography and mythology of California, as well as the uses and failures of language itself, are players in what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, and a trauma survivor in contemporary America.

About the Author

Lynn Melnick is the author of LANDSCAPE WITH SEX AND VIOLENCE (2017), IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE (2012), and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (2015). Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and she has written essays and book reviews for Boston Review, LA Review of Books, and Poetry Daily, among others. A 2017-2018 fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, she teaches poetry at the 92Y and serves on the Executive Board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.