Forthcoming from Blue Horse Press, Fall 2023: Men and Their Flowers – Mela Blust
Watch the book trailer here!!!
In men and their flowers, Mela Blust writes the kind of love poems that cut, bloom and dazzle us
into a wakeful longing. These are deeply vulnerable, intimate poems that ask us to consider what
it means to be fully human and unequivocally cherished. For when are we more human than
when we “touch the fire,” when we move “across a patch of flowers / light spilling from our
fingertips / toward each other?” Blust’s poems burst from the page like bursts of fire and settle
into the chest like “stars and salt.” This collection is one I did not know that I needed, but which
now I will never forget–“a sort of prayer…in shattered rooms,” an urgent and abiding call to love
which unfolds into us and ultimately saves us.
Joan Kwon Glass, author of NIGHT SWIM
They Found a Woman’s Body – Mela Blust
Cover artwork and design by Christopher Payne, based on a photograph by Clare Welsh
These poems explore the complexities of interpersonal relationships with equal measure of nostalgia, horror, and hope. Mela’s words find strength in fragility and heal brutal wounds by exposure.
Mela’s “they found a woman’s body” is a “fine dust awaiting/ fingers,” a “petal tender
mouth” made with “warm blood beating.” It’s a seamless suffocation. A lyric sway
coercing skin with revelatory music. One can’t help but be incanted. Can’t help the way
these poems make them feast on “the smallest crack of bone.” I can’t acquit you
tenderly. These poems are made to fuck you up. They are born to pierce. To placate
nothing. Rouse. But don’t be fooled by their stark and sinewed edges. There are flowers
here. Beauty. Bruised fruit flavored “rock pop sweet.” Sticky pleasure. A salve that pours
“wine on the wound.”
– Luke Johnson, author of :boys (Blue Horse Press, 2019)
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In this tender and haunting debut collection, Mela leads the reader across a tightrope of vulnerability—exploring the body, its constellations of pain, and the long shadows cast by the male gaze. It is a necessary reminder that our darkest hours are often when we find the strength to let in the light back in.
Like tracing your finger along a map of scars, this book is a journey of trauma, longing, whispered memory, and the continuum of self-discovery. —Dani Barnhart, co-editor of Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism
Available at Vegetarian Alcoholic Press.
Skeleton Parade – Mela Blust
This book draws to the surface the wounds of my past. Coping with trauma is a vastly misunderstood process, with far-reaching effects on those who manage to survive it. This collection of poetry examines the themes of how women experience trauma, chaos, and abuse, and, subsequently move through life carrying that weight. Only when beginning to write about my past, and the trauma that I have endured, was I able to let go of some of that darkness, and begin to find a place where there could be light. – Mela Blust
Advanced praise for SKELETON PARADE
In her debut chapbook, Skeleton Parade, Mela Blust exhibits a graceful poetic craft that takes the reader on a dark journey through sexual trauma, despair, anger and possible redemption. “oh i fell down stars again / rabbit hole penny thoughts deep / suckle the ink black dusk / and pray before I sleep.” Deceptively minimalist and bare-boned, these poems are filled with startling imagery and unexpected rhyme like incantations to heal the wounded or raise the dead.
— Beth Gordon, Editor of Gone Lawn Journal and author of Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast, and Parallel Universe.
Mela Blust guides you with sledgehammer voice into the dark recesses of pain and abuse. The poem, “Soliloquy” best sums up her collection with the lines, “I often wonder why/ as children, we are terrified of the monsters under our beds, and as adults, we willingly lie beside them.” With shocking revelation of trauma, Mela corners her abusive past with the perfection of brevity and metaphor, forming each line into a punch of vulnerability shared between author and reader. By the time you’re done reading this, you will have shed tears for her, and begin to question the culture we live in, while screaming to change it.
— Adam Levon Brown, Editor-in-Chief at Madness Muse Press, and author of Break, Poems on Mental Illness.
Skeleton Parade by Mela Blust is limbs disconnecting from the body from the whole from the self is bones breaking oozing crimson blood marrow is crushed remains under withered flowers haunting is all the microscopic scars one can never see with the naked eye. But Skeleton Parade is also ossein finding to connect with the cartilage with the whole with the self is bones unbreaking colligating life again is blooming flora and honey dew between the cracks is supple phoenix raised from the ashes only burning feathers instead of scars.
— Nadia Gerassimenko, Founding Editor at Moonchild Magazine
Skeleton Parade is a pile of bones collected gingerly from the floor and then reassembled again and again into a whole being. Mela Blust pins stark images of ache and truth to each page like artifacts of trauma and evidence of existence. These poems are Plath-like, confessional and raw: “now i take the pain / and turn it into something / i can chew / you will learn / the salt of ache.” Something is being summoned here through these masterful incantations. A survivor emerges;let her words get stuck between your teeth.
— Kailey Tedesco, author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton and Lizzie, Speak.
Mela Blust 
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