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Melissa Buckheit Noctilucent Book Release

w/ Rebecca Seiferle

Saturday, May 5
7:30 p.m.
$5 suggested donation

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 air, 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

Reader Bios

Originally from New York and New England, Melissa Buckheit is a poet, dancer, photographer, English Professor and Bodywork Therapist. She is the author of Noctilucent, published through Shearsman Books in the UK in March 2012, a chapbook, Arc, (The Drunken Boat, 2007), and her poems, translations, photography, interviews and reviews have appeared in nth position, Blue Fifth Review, The Drunken Boat, Blue Collection Chapbook: The Body, Sinister Wisdom, University of Arizona Poetry Center eNewsletter, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Bombay Gin, Pirene’s Fountain, A Trunk of Delirium, Spiral Orb, Shearsman Magazine, and Sonora Review, among others. She translates the poet Ioulita Iliopoulou from Modern Greek and the poet Olga Broumas into French. A recipient of the American Poets Honorary Award, a Grossbardt Prize, and a Tucson-Pima Arts Council Dance grant, her poetry has also been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Naropa University and a B.A. in English & American Literature/Creative Writing and Dance/Theatre from Brandeis University. She has taught Literature and Writing at The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, The Southwest University of Visual Art, Pima Community College, and the University of Arizona, as well as dance through Zuzi! Dance Company. Also a choreographer, Melissa has performed and premiered her work in Boulder, Boston, and Tucson, where she is a member of Brandeis Dance Collective and Zuzi! Dance Company. Melissa is the founder and curator of Edge, a monthly reading series for emerging and younger writers at Casa Libre en la Solana in Tucson, AZ, which emphasizes diversity of narrative, identity, and aesthetic. She lives in Tucson with her partner, Rebecca and their son, Jacob.

Photo by Melissa Buckheit

Rebecca Seiferle's fourth collection, Wild Tongue, (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) won the 2008 Grub Street National Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, Bitters (Copper Canyon, 2001),  won the Western States Book Award and a Pushcart prize. In 2004 she was awarded a poetry fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Her previous collection, The Music We Dance To (Sheep Meadow 1999) won the 1998 Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America and poems from the collection were included in Best American Poetry 2000 and in The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, edited by Erin Belieu and Susan Aizenberg. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Writers’ Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and the National Writers’ Union Prize, and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize.  Her translation of Vallejo’s The Black Heralds was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2003. Her translations of several Cuban poets were included in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, A Bilingual Anthology (University of California Press, 2008, and her translations of Alfonso D'Aquino and Ernesto Lumbreras appeared in Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon 2002). She has regularly reviewed for The Harvard Review and Calyx , and her poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in over twenty-five anthologies. Seiferle has taught  at the Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius, the Provincetown Fine Arts Center, Key West Literary Seminar, Port Townsend Writer’s Conference, Gemini Ink, and the Stonecoast MFA program. From 2004-2006 she was Jacob Ziskind poet-in-residence at Brandeis University. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona and teaches at Southwest University of Visual Arts.