Melissa Andrés’ is a published author and her poetry has appeared in Magma Poetry, Pine Row Poetry Journal, The Sonora Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Other Side of Hope, Rattle Magazine, Ligeia Magazine, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere. She grew up in Florida (Miami and Sarasota) but has lived in New York and Europe. Her first full-length poetry collection Together and Apart is available on Amazon.
About
Together and Apart: Poems
Together and Apart is the debut poetry collection by Melissa Andrés, exploring themes of family history, displacement, and identity, particularly focusing on her Cuban roots and the experience of immigrating to the United States. Published by Pine Row Press, the book delves into personal reflection, memory, and the search for belonging, with poems that are both intimate and powerful.
Reviews for Together and Apart
"In this remarkable debut, Melissa Andrés examines the soul of her family, its history of uprooting themselves in search of something better, of finding the pain of separation aligning itself with the realities of what is strange, and the attempt to make that familiar as the familiar grows strange in mirrors looking to the past. Andrés writes through the unified voice of family speaking and recording its history with a sincerity that establishes Together and Apart as a solid achievement, one that bravely addresses our times."
—Afaa M. Weaver, A Fire in the Hills
"Melissa Andrés’ poems are rooted in life experience. There is a Proustian sense of the world seen through the lens of family history, a world with a beginning and an ending: “The only witnesses who remain / are the coconut palms / my father’s father planted.” It’s a world of labor and contingency – “my mother in halter top and rubber boots, / washed the crates and cleaned the tank...” Andrés’ work is invested with the power of the arc of a human life, the mystery of identity in an age in which landmarks disappear."
—D. Nurkse, A Country of Strangers
"Melissa Andrés’ debut collection, Together and Apart is both intimate and powerful. Every poem possesses empathy and compassion as she explores life along with the lush landscape of her childhood farm in Cuba. When livestock are butchered or taken by the government and land seized, the
young poet is uprooted with her family to the United States. Here there are hardships too as her poems capture the shock of separation from her real home, the complexities of memory, the trauma of learning a new language, and the construction of a new life while connected spiritually and
emotionally to the country she loved and was forced to leave. The poet does in time embrace life here in the United States, however, even in the best of times she writes, 'There is no freedom without sorrow.'"
—Kevin Pilkington, Playing Poker with Tennessee Williams
Links to poetry:
The Bispham Dairy Farm
We wandered and settled
on the Bispham Dairy Farm
where the hills disappeared
and the countryside flattened,
a land filled with Palmetto Palms
with sand no seed could sprout.
Continue reading...
Contact
For any media inquiries or bookings, please contact Melissa.
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