Rough Honey

Selected by Mark Doty from over one thousand manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Melissa Stein’s debut Rough Honey is a startling, sensuous collection. These poems speak of fragility and power, the contradictions of pleasure, the bruises we bear. With remarkable range, they carry us from a whitewater rafting calamity to the “torrents of wheat” on a family farm; from a peepshow’s “manageable storm of boredom and sex” to a passionate fall from grace in an orchard. By turns buoyant and forlorn, Rough Honey’s characters both long for and abandon hope of true connection, of home.…