“With carbon copies, scraps of inherited Spanish, and old snapshots, Melody Wilson explores object permanence within a family full of Madre Dura––“tough mothers.” A matrilineal heritage of names, features, likeness and resistance float through this elegiac collection where “All mothers are mythologies // feathery fables with tongues.” In rich sensory detail and flexible form, readers discover “La Línea” in these poems––the line of complex relationships rooted in transgression and bounded by early deaths. “How much of them is me, how much of me is you,” wonders the speaker who traces the lives of grandmother, mother, sisters, daughters, and granddaughter. Wilson concludes, “…maybe we’re talking about all of us, / eventually, how everything ends in ashes.” Madre Dura is a compelling collection that invites readers to consider how to grapple with uncertainty: how we all might be capable of both holding on and letting go.”
–Ellen Bass, author of Indigo, Like a Beggar and The Human Line.
“Spider, firefly, snail, cricket, starfish, maggot: a spineless creature does indeed make an appearance in every one of this chapbook’s poems, but that commonality is not the only notable feature here. Each of Melody Wilson’s poems relays a part of her personal history. Each shines with lyric grace. Butterflies “corrugate / trunks like furred lungs molting silver / and sage.” Octopus tentacles “twine / dozily among themselves, / in and out, / sentient fiddleheads.” Wilson is a poet who can call a galaxy into her lines, offering us “all the elusive matter // that flutters and glows.”
–Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita
Melody Wilson 