Melissa Studdard

Melissa Studdard Poems

Melissa Studdard Biography

Melissa Stud­dard is the author of the best­selling novel Six Weeks to Yehi­dah (winner of the Forward National Literature Award) and My Yehidah. Her poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and arti­cles have appeared in dozens of jour­nals and antholo­gies, includ­ing Boule­vard, Con­necti­cut Review, Pleiades, Gradiva, Amer­i­can Book Review, Poets and Writers, and The Smok­ing Poet. She serves as a reviewer-at-large for The National Poetry Review and a con­tribut­ing edi­tor for Tiferet Journal. As well, she is the host of Tiferet’s radio inter­view program, Tiferet Talk, which interviews writers and spiritual and religious leaders. Studdard received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a professor at a community college in Texas and a teaching artist at The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative.)

The Best Poem Of Melissa Studdard

Sudden Encounters

The Orinoco overflows from a goblet,
spouts from the center as though
water had wings. I'm telling you,
this goblet rests on a table
in the hollow of a tree—so
deliberate that you can't help
but question if the almighty
watchmaker set it there himself.
Paley would have had his say,
to be sure, but this is about Varo
and her own fantastical teleology,
about how the source is never
what you would expect, how
inspiration swims like pink dolphins
through the rivers of night, daring
you to look into its eyes, challenging
you to brave a lifetime of nightmares
for the purchase of a moment of genius,
to be like the woman manning a vessel
no one else has ever seen, like Varo
herself—swimming on the river
with wings, her retinas burnt and open
by frequent, sudden encounters
with dark and unholy gods.

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