Description: An archivally driven poetry collection that tells the story of the antislavery movement in the United States with a particular focus on its print culture
Brief description: Melissa Range is the author of Scriptorium, winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series competition, and Horse and Rider, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Her recent poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Hopkins Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, and Ploughshares. Range has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Fine Arts Work Center, and MacDowell. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
Review Quotes: "Melissa Range's Printer's Fist flies squarely in the face of exclusionary American history to counter efforts to privilege a particular perspective. Part of the play and, ironically, joy of this book is the way Range uses the archive as poetic form. This is probably what I find most astonishing about this collection, that while it remains fervently committed to its ethical assertions, the play of this poet's mind across its subject matter points us toward further discovery and reflection."
--Gregory Pardlo, Vanderbilt University Literary Prize jurist