Parenting Tips for New Moms

The Parting is a collection of one dozen prose poems and short fictions previously published and anthologized. These compressed, lyrical, and narrative works conjure quiet dream worlds of partings, transformations, and transmigrations. Invisible witnesses populate these half-familiar, half-illusory dreamscapes: Honey bees, foxes, milk white birds, ghost girls, water nymphs, lost infants, feral cats, and winged visitors haunt the shaded spaces of the living. The cover painting by Robert Valdes foretells the book's atmosphere of midnight blues.

Melora Wolff walks the boundary between meta-fiction and prose poetry in this brief, intense collection of fables, quasi-fables, dreams, and dream-songs. Like a porcelain bowl filled with river stones, The Parting presents a series of intimate, lapidary, water-worn worlds that will haunt the reader long after they have closed the book, says Campbell McGrath.

The compressed, distilled, and riveting prose poems that comprise The Parting feel like the residue of "rapture and grief." Image-driven, at times surrealistic, Melora Wolff's poems weigh the longing for intimacy against the "loneliness" that often interposes. They dwell in the space between the self and its relation to others (lover, mother, etc.), asking—"How long will they stay poised between one night and another?" In the spirit of Marquez and Hass, Wolff's poems are spun from dream-logic, unforgettable language, and in equal measure her powerful lyric imagination and heart, according to Shara McCallum.

Melora Wolff's prose poems perfect an atmosphere of dreamlike repose. Her language shimmers like the darkening surface of water. As I go deeper and deeper into this book of partings, I sense the torn ditch of experience being replaced by new soil and grass, says Henri Cole.

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