Lo: Poems (Iowa Poetry Prize)

by Melissa Crowe

Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.

• ISBN10: 1609388992
• ISBN13: 9781609388997
• Publish Date: 31 May 2023
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: University of Iowa Press
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 88
• Language: English

Reviews

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This book is steeped in desire.

 

It’s easy to see why this collection won an award. To quote Sally Beauman, “death and desire live back to back” and that’s the easiest way to describe this book and speak of the unnameable hurt and the hurt that we arm ourselves against for the sake of those two.

 

I’ll be honest, I downloaded and waited so long to read Lo by Melissa Crowe that the book expired on the netgalley app on my phone and my iPad. I’m glad it was already on my kindle, even if I do suspect that sending poetry books to kindle removes any and all formatting they have.

 

And when I did read it I lapped it up.

 

And it genuinely has been a while since I read a poetry collection which as a whole has worked. There is nothing is this book that could be considered mediocre or bad; everything has a place and a purpose. It feels like Melissa Crowe knew exactly what she wanted to put together and did it.

 

Thank you NetGalley and University of Iowa Press for the chance to read such a stunning collection.

 

Favourite poems:

 

I’m Not Mad at My Mother for Letting Me Roam the Neighborhood Unsupervised

But Nothing Bad Ever Happened to Me in the Woods

When she speaks of fire