Spineless: Memoir in Invertebrates by Melody Wilson

Spider, firefly, snail, cricket, starfish, maggot: a spineless creature does indeed make an appearance in every one of this chapbook’s poems, but that commonality is not the only notable feature here. Each of Melody Wilson’s poems relays a part of her personal history. Each shines with lyric grace. Butterflies “corrugate / trunks like furred lungs molting silver / and sage.” Octopus tentacles “twine / dozily among themselves, / in and out, / sentient fiddleheads.” Wilson is a poet who can call a galaxy into her lines, offering us “all the elusive matter // that flutters and glows.”

–Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

The poems in Melody Wilson’s Spineless: Memoir in Invertebrates buzz, hum, creak, and slide, and do what my favorite poetry does: remind me there’s a bigger world outside of me, and I would do well to pay attention. These poems, as varied in form and approach as that branch of organism itself—the invertebrate—tell stories of family, memory, worry, wonder, and loss, and do so with sharp wit, beautiful imagery, and style. One can’t help but fall in love with Melody Wilson’s vision and voice.

–Jeff Whitney, author of Sixteen Stories (Flume Press) and Radio Silence (Black Lawrence Press)

We don’t have to be entomologists to appreciate Melody Wilson’s intriguing chapbook. As insects like fireflies, ladybirds, crickets, roaches, and garden snails thread their way through these well-crafted poems, she situates them in the landscape of memory. With a voice that is precise, intimate, and tender, she captures moments from childhood to motherhood and invites us to experience them with her. For example, metaphorically describing her own pregnancy, she writes, I don’t recall deciding, just evolving, one stage to another,/migrating like a monarch from dark to light./You fluttered first on a drive to Salinas. The subtlest/brush against my heart,/and in that instant,/I came to exist. These poems exist to engage us with a master poet who reveals––and revels in ––the beautiful truths of verte- and invertebrates. What a creative achievement!

–Carolyn Martin, Ph.D., poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation