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Melanie Noel
she/her
poet, editor, facilitator of mischief, astrologer
Melanie Noel is a poet, editor and astrologer who lives on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish near the Salish Sea. She's the author of The Monarchs and A Ringing and has a poem forthcoming in Lana Turner. Her work has also appeared in La Norda Specialo and the Seattle Review of Books. She curated a reading series that took place in her grandmother's Impala and another a small music venue, Gallery 1412. She also sometimes facilitates outdoor workshops meant to invoke synesthesia and an altered sense of scale, most recently at the Woodland Park rose garden and zoo.
About Their Work:
Let me just say first that, though I have never seduced a mosquito, I very much believe that Melanie Noel could do so. Her stunning chapbook, “A Ringing,” is full of what has always made her a ravishing poet: imagery fueled not just by vivid observation and notation but by the quiet mutation of that imagery into something we can’t imagine until she presents it to us. The “successful self-duel’ of this book is for the speaker to move seamlessly from cats, moths, bees, dogs, pines, figs to the tigers of the night and back again. It’s her attentiveness to the permeable borders of a present world that make all this possible: “The chainsaw in the distance erupts the ear, but the lobelia and germander won’t explode ./ Hazy flowers smoke politely in the ivy and cherries ferment/ in the grass below. I try to take a picture/ but the camera can’t touch anything. My eye touches/ and things touch back.” It’s the writer’s great gift to find words for that touching back. So let’s let Noel take us on this trip and journey with her into the sayable unknown.
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