New Book :: The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat
The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat
Poetry by Melody S. Gee
Driftwood Press, June 2022
Melody S. Gee’s The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat meets at the intersection of cultural and spiritual identity, culminating in a set of harrowing poems that investigates how belief defines us. Melody S. Gee is the author of The Dead in Daylight (Cooper Dillon Books, 2016) and Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), winner of the Perugia Press Prize. She is the recipient of Kundiman poetry and fiction fellowships, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Robert Watson Literary Prize. Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in Commonweal Magazine, Blood Orange Review, Lantern Review, and The Rappahannock Review. She is a freelance writer and editor living in St. Louis, Missouri with her husband and daughters. An excerpt from the collection:
THE CONVERT DESIRES HER WAY INTO A FIRST PRAYER
Her mother’s first lesson
was chew your wants and spit
the pulp, grow skinny feeding everyone else your flesh.
A heart’s cargo is sometimes oil, sometimes crude. A spill can undo
the waterproof of any surface.
And still the diving birds must feed,
must point their beaks past the slick that seals the cornea to eternal blur.
Does the Lord ask her what she wants when he already knows its name?
