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Framed as a job application, and bounding with associative leaps and surrealist underpinnings, Dear Selection Committee is a subversive, sexy love song to an endlessly messy self and the burning world it inhabits. Full of apostrophic power, these poems shift among registers of loss, desire, and joy as they wrestle with issues such as climate change, addiction, modern distractions, gender presentation, religious questioning, and the nature of pain. Dear Selection Committee attests that although life can feel like a bumpy cab ride to interview for a job you feel uniquely unqualified for if you lay aside the anxieties of self just long enough to peer out the window, you'll see great beauty amidst the chaos.
About the author
Melissa Studdard is the author of five books, including the poetry collection I ATE THE COSMOS FOR BREAKFAST. Her work has been published or featured by places such as NPR, PBS, The New York Times, The Guardian, POETRY, Kenyon Review, Psychology Today, and New England Review. Her awards include The Poetry Society of America's Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the REEL Poetry Festival Audience Choice Award, the Tom Howard Prize, and more.
