Closer

Melinda Clemmons' writing has appeared in One Art, Rust & Moth, Midwest Review, Shrew, West Trestle Review, The Imprint, and elsewhere. Closer is her first poetry collection. She was a finalist for the 2025 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize from Ex Ophidia Press as well as the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award. With an earlier version of this manuscript, she was a finalist for the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and a semi-finalist for both the Word Works Washington Prize and the Red Mountain Press Discovery Award. Melinda grew up in Southern Illinois, and now lives in Oakland, California, where she works as a freelance writer for nonprofits.

Melinda Clemmons'Closer is a luminous catalog of wonder, a collection attuned to the quiet ways revelation enters our lives. Through small gestures and motel pools, young love and graveyard serenades at dusk, these poems illuminate the significance of what we might otherwise overlook. With the expansive longing of youth and the hard-earned wisdom of experience, Clemmons guides readers toward a deeper attentiveness to the world around them. These poems invite us to "drive mapless and listen," to trust the heart's instincts, linger in the moments that shape a life, and "let the sacred fill [us] still." Tender, wise, and deeply human, Closer is a collection readers will return to again and again, discovering new beauty in the fleeting details that make us who we are.

-Kelly Grace Thomas, author of Future Tense

In Closer, Melinda Clemmons turns attention into a form of devotion. The dead and the disappearing haunt these poems - a neighbor losing herself to dementia, a father naming his children after a near-miss on a dark road-and so does the question of what we are left  holding when they go. Laced with marriages and their undoings, with daughters growing up and away, she moves between the grand and the granular, always pressing toward what lasts, always asking what remains when love changes shape. "What can I do but go on, wanting what I loved to last," she writes-and that is exactly it: the ache of impermanence, and the stubborn insistence on presence anyway. Closer is a collection that stays with you the way the best memories do: without asking permission.

-Tracey Knapp, author of Swerve

In this moving book, Melinda Clemmons describes, and then tests, boundaries. There are physical boundaries-roads at the edge of town, haloes of motel light, state lines, shorelines-and less physical ones-belief, marriage, friendship, memory, parenthood. But the speaker of these poems never breaks or questions a barrier just to see what will happen; it is always with the hope of returning back to a discernible center, somehow changed and made better. In a crisp, earnest and lyrical free verse, Clemmons writes the world as she sees it-full of pain, shadows, regret, loss and distance, certainly, but also always full of intimacy, light, relief and love.

-Nathaniel Perry, author of Long Rules