Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Abider
by Melissa Crowe
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026, $20.00, 110 pages, ISBN: 978-0-8229-6837-5
Melisa Crowe has always engaged raw emotion in her verse. The title of her 2019 collection, Dear Terror, Dear Splendor, suggests as much. (The title poem is on the occasion of her daughter getting a learner’s permit to drive a car.) In “Acceptance Speech,” a poem in her new collection, Abider, she writes, “I’m almost done, I swear,” as if speaking to an audience at an awards ceremony, expressing her faux gratitude for being given an honor, a promotion.
Just let me mention the nights I woke
swollen with terror, certain I’d grown
monstrously large in my sleep…
Later, addressing those elemental emotions, she goes on in the same tone of mock solemnity:
thank you, fear,
tenderness, I could not have become
this, or much, without you
While Crowe is able to gently mock herself, the instinct to protect herself and hers is strong in her. We get that from her autobiographical topics. The circumstances of her birth are an important focus of some of these poems. Raised by a single mother, she did not know her biological father, until she did. The poem “I Want to Go to Them and Say Stop” starts:
Thank god for the things I’ll never
understand—what made my mother take
my father’s hand across the decades
that separated them, across the carcass
of his marriage and the bar behind which
she worked, the one he idled up to night
night until whatever kept their bodies
apart—polite distance, obligation, fear—
dissolved. Then I began. He disappeared,
reappeared in his actual life, in the bed
across the table from his wife.
Later in the poem Crowe recounts finally meeting the man
in that quiet my small voice:
I think you know my mother. I said it,
but I didn’t believe it. Even now I can’t
put them in the same room, never mind
a bed, a backseat…
She describes the encounter:
When we met he said I looked
like her—that much makes sense—me the age
she was when he fucked her: eighteen.
Crowe lived an untamed life growing up in Maine, an uncle who taught her to hitchhike (“I Never Touch the Stuff but Oh It Touches Me”), flirting with carnies at the amusement park (“Home Training”). “You smelled the dirt on me, / didn’t you?” she asks in “I’m Tired of Writing about My Childhood.” In “Always I Have Been Trying to Show Her” she describes how, at the age of fifteen, she allowed a boy to see her naked body, a gesture she thought of as a gift (“and wasn’t that // his life then, at fifteen—desire and barriers / to desire”).
But compare that to the helicopter parents, and it’s no contest. In “Home Training” Crowe concedes that her mother, at nineteen, didn’t always offer protective advice, recommend caution, but
In the absence of the hovering love some kids
endured, I got up to things—in the woods,
by the railroad tracks, in backseats—I wouldn’t
like to unlive. I’m not so wild anymore.
Even untutored, I learned how a woman’s
meant to temper her hungers, cross her legs
and shut her mouth. But I taught myself to feel
good. Can’t unlearn. My grown hand knows
its way to treasure. Tongue finds honey just fine.
Crowe starts the “Same, Girl” section of the concluding suite, “The Self-Love Museum,” by confessing, “I have long felt dirty in God’s sight.” This echoes back to the childhood poems. In “Dear Life” she writes:
I remember a pastor telling me when I was maybe nine
that animals can’t go to heaven, and at twelve I saw
some man on TV say the same about me, illegitimate,
unredeemed, my mother’s own original sin.
As her life goes on, Crowe’s marriage to the father of her child ends in divorce as she becomes involved with another woman. “Second Person” and “En Plein Air” are poems about this love. She vividly describes the heat of her lust, her desire, in both poems. “En Pleine Air” concludes:
How the hours moved hungry.
We did not get our fill.
How we came away burning.
I’m burning still.
Meanwhile, her relationship with her husband falls apart, as recounted in “Cold Turkey,” “In the Wilderness” (“For forty nights after he leaves…”), “The Speaker’s Husband” (“I loved a man for thirty years, and then // we disappeared.”). Later in “The Speaker’s Husband” she writes: “When we parted you asked / if I’m going to be gay now, and I said I’m what / I’ve always been.” In the poem “After” she writes:
I thought if I left my marriage,
I’d evaporate, so I kept quiet, sank
inside myself like a pocket stone. I still
don’t know who’s in the room with me
when I’m alone.
The poem ends: “He keeps asking who / I left him for. He doesn’t know it’s me.”
Crowe also writes about being a poet. In “Why I Am a Poet,” a title taken from William Stafford, she writes about her early fascination with poetry.
I thought I could wring sense from
language, collapse the distance between
word and thing.
In “I’m Tired of Writing About My Childhood” she elaborates on her love of the power of words:
I like the word gloaming as much as glimmer,
how it holds both glow and loam, makes
of time a pageant, makes loss of light
another kind of light. I would write a sonnet
for daybreak, first beam by which you
watch your lovers leave…
So, speaking of words, why the title of Abider? When I see that word I always think of that movie with Jeff Bridges, The Big Lebowski, and the phrase it made popular, “The dude abides.” He accepts life as it comes at him. He endures. You intuit something of that attitude in Melissa Crowe. The collection is introduced with a poem called “I’ve Never Stopped Loving Anyone.” She expresses something of that Zen-like acknowledgement of the unpredictability of life, a calm acceptance underlying it all.
It’s not that I grieve slow—my resting
heart’s a hummingbird, my love
a kind of endless blur. His sugar, hers,
brings me back and back to the yard,
so frequently it’s like I stayed. I sleep
hard in all the beds I’ve ever made.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and most recently, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.