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Rhea Melina
she/her
poet
Rhea Melina (she/her) is a multi-ethnic poet who lives in Seattle. She is an educator, birth-worker and herbalist who has been writing and putting out poetry since the early 2000’s. Her chapbooks include “Fireant” (SSO Press, 2005), “These are not secrets” (XYZ Animal Stars, 2009), “a place to put things” (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and “Not My Wasteland” (Bone Machine, 2024). Her poems have been published in Fiilthy Glo Zine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, Papers Pub, Rising Phoenix Review and Text Power Telling Magazine, among others. found confetti is her first full length collection.
About Their Work:
In her debut collection, Found Confetti, Rhea Melina would like you to know she’s THAT neighbor — the resilient Dandelion-tattooed “weed” with “wild hair” who churns the seeming dead yard to seeds, turns bile to balm and ticker-tape finance detritus to the found confetti of poetry, and whose eyes belie a faith in “a sea that will wash over all of us.” Her poems take us on a tour through that Neptunian ocean of grief for the (living-)dead, the rejected, the unhoused, the self-medicated, beaten-down, tired, “fixin’ to earn something shiny” yet “beyond broken” masses who dream of more than high credit-scores and Ponzi-scheme “games played to be lost” and embalmed, lobotomized sod plots and less-bad coffee and 10-floor, glass-encased hamster wheels and tidy sentences that don’t run-on. These incantations of witness, these anti-confessions swell into spells for breathable air that drives the natural world — dandelions, hyacinths, morning glories, and all the tree-becoming shoots that “[finger] up the truth and Gawd only knows where that’s been.” They take in the toxins, the traumas and synthesize them and exhale a sea of empathy and hope and love, enough spacious air for us all to “make sense of our senseless existence."
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Books (for purchase):
found confetti (Carbonation Press, 2024)
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