Join us for an afternoon of poetry with visiting poets Melissa Cundieff and Trey Moody. Melissa and Trey are both native Texans who currently live in Saint Paul and Omaha, respectively. Melissa is from Dallas, and her first book, DARLING NOVA was just released with Autumn House Press as the winner of their poetry prize. It's a beautiful, haunting exploration of love and loss and many of the poems are based/set in Dallas and its environs. Trey is from San Antonio. His debut collection, THOUGHT THAT NATURE won the Morton Prize from Sarabande Books in 2014.
About the Books
THOUGHT THAT NATURE identifies and captures moments when the border between personal consciousness and the otherness of the physical become porous. Ironically, it also allows Moody to measure the distance between consciousness and direct experience, even as he casts this gap in memorable speech. This debut collection offers the reader sensual delight and intellectual pursuit—a rare and bracing combination.
DARLING NOVA is a collection of compellingly constructed narratives that makes new connections, new sparks, new thought as often as line to line. The poems are patient but not slow, engaging in constantly evocative language, however quiet they may at first appear. The language, finally, is quite simply alive and the collective thinking in this book is the stuff of the body’s own connective tissue. The voyage through these poems encompasses much—grief, love, humanness—but the narrative, the speaker, the events keep moving, so that we ourselves are moved.
About the Authors
Melissa Cundieff is the author of Darling Nova (Autumn House Press, 2018), selected by Alberto Ríos for the Autumn House Poetry Prize. She received an MFA in poetry from Vanderbilt University, where she was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems appear in The Adroit Journal, Bat City Review, Best of the Net, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, and TriQuarterly. Originally from Texas, she lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Trey Moody was born in San Antonio, Texas. His first book, Thought That Nature (Sarabande Books, 2014), was selected by Cole Swensen for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His writing has received support from the Academy of American Poets, Slope Editions, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and his work has appeared in Best New Poets, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Washington. Square, and West Branch. He teaches in the MFA program at Creighton University and lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Find him online at treymoody.org.