Poetry.
In Melissa Balmain's WALKING IN ON PEOPLE, the serious is lightened with a generous serving of wit and humor, and the lighthearted is enriched with abundant wisdom.
She shows us how poetry can be fun yet grounded in everyday challenges and triumphs, with subjects ranging from the current and hip (Facebook posts, online dating, layoffs, retail therapy, cell-phone apps, trans fat), to the traditional and time-tested (marriage, child-rearing, love, death).
Through it all, her craft is masterful, with a formal dexterity deployed with precision in a showcase of forms such as the villanelle, ballad, triolet, nonce, and the sonnet.
It is little wonder then that Walking in on People is the winner of the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, as selected by the final judge, X.
Kennedy.
This is a collection that will not only entertain thoroughly, but also enlighten and reward the reader.
WALKING IN ON PEOPLE grabbed me with its very title, and it never let go.
Poetry these days is rarely so entertaining, so beautifully crafted, so sharp of eye, yet so wise and warm of heart.
Melissa Balmain keenly perceives faults in people and in our popular culture, with piercing wit but never bitterness.
Don't miss the wonderful Lament, on what it takes to write a best seller, or The Marital Bed, a love poem with naturalistic detail.
She really commands her art.
Indeed, I think any poet who rhymes lobsters and Jersey mobsters deserves to have an equestrian statue of herself erected in Bangor or Newark or both.
Kennedy Melissa Balmain's poems add to the rhythmic bounce of light verse a darker, more cutting humor.
The result is an infectious, often hilarious blend of the sweet and the lethal, the charming and the acidic.
Billy Collins So many of the poems in Melissa Balmain's triumphant debut lodge themselves in that Frostian zone where they are hard to get rid of.
They recur in the mind in moments of hilarity and pathos, of exaltation and mortification, and they never let us go.
Able Muse Press Walking in on people, paperback/melissa balmain
