Melissa Buckheit

Noctilucent Melissa Buckheit

Poetry. The poems in NOCTILUCENT begin where light exists or is created in darkness, a paradox. But this is not a "dark / light" of metaphor, but of the real and of relationship, where algae illumines the deep sea, the light of dead stars reach us from deep space, and night is a doorway, an entrance into the interior?of self, other, cosmos. Melissa Buckheit bridges human experience?personal, historical, social?into this space where the very thing which is invisible or hidden, must be spoken. There is no Truth?but truths, identity, eros, suffering, loss gleam along the interstices of the lyric as meaning embedded in a strange and musical syntax. We are surprised, as if by a pale-white, fragrant Datura blooming unforgivingly in the dark of night, by her intimacy and electric force. In NOCTILUCENT, the beloved is every human body, a decaying salmon, or the lilts of a lover's voice?our human memory in the impermanence of the world.

"With an aerial dancer's muscular flair, ingrained precision & gravity-defying ease, NOCTILUCENT deploys the sensory intricacies of high lyric, iridescent candor & dynamic range to serve our imagination an eclectic feast of electrifying, intimate, thermospheric meditations on the fractals of our possible world. Kudos indeed!"?Olga Broumas

"Melissa Buckheit's poems are radically open and in love, as if words constellated an amorous ocean licking after the desert, or a desert creeping toward its beloved and necessary water. These poems both gather and give, and know that since the smallest of particles are constantly shooting through our bodies, we must 'rearrange surrender.'"?Eleni Sikelianos

"The stardust is the beloved, and aquaria, red-shifts, ocotillo are also welcome here. NOCTILUCENT shimmers and deepens with each turn of page. 'I submerged my head for the image / we were seeking of ourselves?' Buckheit's poetry trembles with its own awakening inside a delicate biosphere of erotics."?Anne Waldman