Dear Selection Committee
“Melissa Studdard is already an accomplished poet, but her newest collection—Dear Selection Committee—feels special. Framed as a job application, the book disrupts and actively fights against the ways that work has taken over people’s lives in recent years. Surprising and defiant, Studdard’s poetry feels especially poignant now, as a recession and inflation loom overhead.”-Megan Reynolds, Jewish Book Council Read More
___________________
“Studdard delivers or channels or becomes the instrument of a god or goddess or a worldview that is so forgiving that we can all see ourselves in the light of non-judgement, the light of all that is right with the world.” -Alicia Elkort, Tinderbox Poetry Journal Read More
___________________
“Dear Selection Committee shreds a staid, worn-out script then rewrites it, exposing and extolling the tangled contradictions and desires that accompany womanhood today.” –Laura Dennis, Mom Egg Review Read More
___________________
“With resplendent confidence, Melissa Studdard’s Dear Selection Committee flies the reader through a job application. Spiritual, humorous, and tender, the book demonstrates the pros and cons of living without limits.”-Hanna Pachman, Verseville Read More
___________________
“Dear Selection Committee by Melissa Studdard is a poetry collection that will have you on your toes, make you gape in awe, and have you wishing you kept some of your own boldness on the surface.”-Serena Agusto-Cox, Savvy Verse & Wit Read More
___________________
“I buried // everything they told me to bury. Then, I dug it up again,” Melissa Studdard writes in Dear Selection Committee, an apt description of the work these poems do to unearth the incorrigible self and bury conventionality and its offspring, shame. The speaker revels in her largesse, claiming, in one poem’s title, she’s “Huge Like King Kong, Like Godzilla, Like Gulliver,” and that the “world is my diorama of a world,” and in another, that her honeymoon pictures are “the cover / of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.” All of this immensity, this grand unburying, is squeezed into the prosaic corseting structure of a job application, intensifying the split between tame and wild. Even her own birth is enacted with kinetic magnificence: “I broke the kingdom inside her, broke the gala / of horses straining to get out. I broke the dancehall // mirrors and even the gilded faucet handles. / I was a river that strong. Made for flooding.” Indeed, these poems are so desirous and animated that they spilled over the edges of the page and into my thirsty soul. “-Diane Seuss
___________________
“The poems in Dear Selection Committee say what I’ve always wanted to say in a job application (and what I’m thinking as I perform the role of Normal Job Person) but never had the guts. Melissa Studdard’s burn-it-down-radical honesty is elating af—exactly what I needed to read—but the poetic attentiveness, from the first page to the last, was the real thrill. At the heart of the cyclone, a dependable, deepening pulse of self preservation.” -Jennifer L. Knox
___________________
“In the universe of Melissa Studdard’s poems, both the speaker and the audience will always have their cake and eat it too. After all, “Life’s never dull when your name’s Melissa,” and oh my goddess, does Dear Selection Committee serve hard as a brilliant 21st century take and critique of the epistolary, filled with infinite heart and infinite humor and infinite neon signs that point towards the larger-than-life nature of poetry. This is excess. This is extravagance. This is the definition of sensuality. Studdard has the tremendous gift of finding the center of every poem, giving us the whole damn thing.” -Dorothy Chan
___________________
“With a sharp edge (and sharper pen) in combination with tremendous wit, Studdard gives everything and holds back nothing while calling out deeply problematic systems, norms, and realities, especially those faced by women.”-Jen Schneider, Mad Poets Society Read More