Melissa Chadburn is a fellow with The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, she has written for Guernica, Buzzfeed, Poets & Writers, American Public Media’s Marketplace, Al Jazeera America and dozens other places. Her essay, “The Throwaways,” received notable mention in Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Spring of 2017
Whether you read it as poetry or memoir, this collection will invite you into the delicate balance between the challenging, sometimes squalid, human condition and the beauty and sadness of the transcendent.
Howe’s Magdalene is ambitious in its reach and strangely timely, as American society has swung to the right and, in the process, against the tide of equality for women.
To refuse to disappear at mid-life—I am forty-two as of the writing of this essay—is perhaps the best rebellion a woman poet can make to the literary world and to the world at large.