Regina O’Melveny

ABOUT REGINA O’MELVENY:

Regina O’Melveny is an artist and writer whose work has been published in literary magazines such as The Bellingham Review, The Sun, West Marin Review, and Barrow Street. Her poem, “Fireflies,” won the Conflux Press Nature Poetry Award, released as an artist’s book designed by Tania Baban. She has published three chapbooks: Secret, New and other gods which won a prize from the Munster International Literary Centre in Ireland. Full-length poetry books include Blue Wolves, winner of the Bright Hill Press award, and The Shape of Emptiness from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her novel, The Book of Madness and Cures, published by Little, Brown and Company, was listed as one of the six best historical novels of the year by NPR when it was released. Her recent second novel, The Sea-Cure, is from Running Wild Press. She tends a coastal sage scrub garden for pollinators in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

ABOUT A GOOD BROOM:

A Good Broom offers four seasons of poetry from a region often overlooked for seasonal change, the City of Angels, Los Angeles. Seasons that spring from the land and elements as well as the poet’s life intertwine with nature. Seasons where subtle angles of light determine the shadows of the heart as well as the bright swathes of joy. Seasons that span decades as wild nature teaches the bounty of age, even as it creates the seeds of passage.

ADVANCE PRAISE:

Picking up any poem by Regina O’Melveny, one is drawn into mysterious relations, the palpable joy of redeeming nature and potent grief. I am particularly moved by her connection to the power of the small and its transformative ability, her words demonstrating how much it has to teach us, though these natural and insect worlds are rarely regarded. Through her poems it is clear that in their domain, which she describes with so much beauty and perception, the remarkable fabric of life does sustain us with wonder.

––Katya Kathleen Williamson, author of Leap: From Faith to Empowerment   

The connection with the things of nature and ourselves is everywhere in these poems. Trees talk, mountains wait and watch, birds and insects teach. Regina O’Melveny marries the mystical, the unknown, with the keen eye of science. You will come away with knowledge you didn’t have, and kudos to you if you remember that “psaltriparus minimus [is] Latin for tiny lute-player”. Lucky for us we can refer back to the book if we forget.

––Katharine Vandewark, author of Dead Calm, Night Heron

The Shape of Emptiness
by Regina O’Melveny

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ABOUT THE SHAPE OF EMPTINESS:

The lyric poems that compose the three parts of The Shape of Emptiness, while each distinct, work in concert like the near invisible lines of an orb-weaver who tacks her continuous silk to the spokes of a web, beginning at the center, spiraling ever outward and then returning to center again.  At the outset the poems explore the poet’s core relationship with her father and his haunting absence. Then they touch upon the tragedy of suicide and her mother’s troubled mind and heart.  A hunger for connection runs through all the poems informed by the meditations and urgencies of the soul. In the last section of the book the poems draw upon the experiences that bind the poet to her husband, daughter and animal companions, in ways that open toward the greater fabric of nature of which we are all a part. Throughout the book, the delicate yet resilient strands between nature and human concerns are tested, explored, mourned where they have been torn, and celebrated where they hold, as revelatory and healing.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE SHAPE OF EMPTINESS:

The language of these poems creeps so close to the natural world it gets entangled in it and soon we are also submerged in harsh truth and ultimate beauty. Here, in The Shape of Emptiness, life crackles and death comes alive. This book is true medicine. Drink deeply. Take it in. Yes. – Deena Metzger, author of the novels A Rain of  Night Birds, La Negra y Blanca, and Feral; and Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems