Melissa Range

Second Bloom

Arts & Literature

“In lines saturated with colors and delicious with sneaky rhymes, in elegies and ekphrastic poems, in liturgical poems and hymns to ordinary things in ordinary time—a slinky green dress, a son’s light-brown hair, a grape popsicle on the tongue after days of hospital fasting—Silver gives us life’s pain met time and again with pleasure and feast, rather than with despair. Although ‘the roses in second bloom / know what’s coming,’ they bloom nonetheless. To read this book is to witness Silver seeking, and finding, holiness around every corner.”