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I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast
by Melissa Studdard
62 pages/40 poems
Publisher: Saint Julian Press
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0988944758
ISBN-13: 978-0988944756
Price: $18.00
Amazon.com


ABOUT THE BOOK:


With Whitmanesque exuberance and voracity, Melissa Studdard's I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast
is a collection that devours the world even as it offers it‐a collection that, through all its doubts
and wounds, through "fire, ice, hurricanes, tsunamis, and quakes" arrives "with that tornado in
its throat"‐love‐to spark renewal again and again.

Noting the voluptuous, yet spiritual thrust of the book, Robert Pinsky states, "Melissa Studdard's
high-flying, bold poetic language expresses an erotic appetite for the world: 'this desire to butter
and eat the stars,' as she says, in words characteristically large yet domestic, ambitious yet chuck-
ling at their own nerve. This poet's ardent, winning ebullience echoes that of God, a recurring char-
acter here, who finds us Her children, splotchy, bawling and imperfect though we are, 'flawless in her
omniscient eyes."

Poet Cate Marvin observes, "In so many ways the poems in this book read like paintings, touching and
absorbing the light of the known world while fingering the soul until it lifts, trembling. Gates splayed,
bodies read as books, and hearts born of mouths, Studdard's study, which is a creation unto itself, would
have no doubt pleased Neruda's taste for the alchemic impurity of poetry, which is, as we know, poetry
that is not only most pure of heart, but beautifully generous in vision and feeling."


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Melissa Studdard is the author the bestselling novel, Six Weeks to Yehidah, and other books. Her works
have received numerous awards, including the Forward National Literature Award and the International
Book Award. Her poems and short writings have appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, and she
serves or has recently served as a reviewer-at-large for The National Poetry Review, an interviewer for
American Microreviews and Interviews, a professor for Lone Star College System, a teaching artist for
The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative, an editorial adviser for The Criterion, and host of Tiferet Talk
radio.


FROM THE BOOK:


No philosopher has yet solved the problem of evil
by Melissa Studdard

I guess the sunset forgot to tell them about its beauty.
Ditto the stars.
Because the evening smells
like gun smoke. And someone's down,
or passed out. Too much whistling and
forgot to take a breath. No. Look
how beautiful, the night‐
dusk cracked
open and growing a strange silence,
blood on the floor
worm in the blood,
body clinging to the soul like a parasite.
I don't have to say it. You know what I mean.
What I'm asking. Why?
Didn't they see the sunset?
Didn't they see the stars?


Originally published in Tupelo Quarterly.


 

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