,

Photo: Lorraine Chittock/Saudi Aramco World

on 94th Street, in NEW YORK POEMS

on 94th street
rain upon snow the long summer long
where footsteps tire and tireless the track
of wheels and window-washing
over cracks that rattle carts
and carriages of babies flying down
a hill of stillness shouted into dark
to everyone who hurrying along will
shuffle back no ending starts and
stirs again alarming moans and
calling out of tune will ruin
silences the sweep of sun one touch
is touching one is touching it
a friend of evening
with you

News and Notes
Welcome to my new website!

New Publications: I'm featured in four new poetry anthologies, 2008: Inclined to Speak (Charara, Univ. of Arkansas Press), Language for a New Century (Chang, Handal, Shangar, W.W. Norton), and Long Island Sounds (Nuzzo-Morgan, NSPS Press). The fourth, also from Norton, will appear late this year.

Poetry acceptances: Al Jadid, And Then, Asbestos, Big City Lit, Home Planet News; late last year: Banipal (England) and Offshoots (Geneva, Switzerland). Review-essay of Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, was just published in the March 2008 issue (No. 46) of Socialism and Democracy, a distinguished journal of research. I consider S&D the intellectual vanguard of social change (check it out!).

Two short novels in one volume, Stigma & The Cave (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2007), are receiving a highly favorable review by Victor Cohen in that magazine’s July 2008 issue. They were warmly welcomed by Matthew Paris in Donald Lev’s Home Planet News (No. 59). Stigma & The Cave, which complete the trilogy begun with Blight (distributed by SUP), will also be reviewed in American Book Review.

Stigma is a dark political satire on the association among government, the military, and industry; The Cave is a fantasy about a nuclear attack on the United States. Together, the trilogy speaks to the legacy we are leaving to future generations.

Blight, the first book (Riverrun, 1995), is an environmental fantasy. It’s also distributed exclusively by Syracuse. For more details, search Melhem at www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.



D. H. Melhem

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Upcoming Events

Poetry One-On-One
June 13-20, 2008

IWWG Summer Conference Poetry Workshop

I’ll be giving individual poetry cosultations at the IWWG Annual Summer Conference at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs. Due to demand by conference attendees, these workshops have been completely subscribed.

details

Upcoming and Recent Publications

Stigma & The Cave
(Syracuse University Press, 2007)

Published April 2007.

Final two novels in the trilogy PATRIMONIES, begun with BLIGHT.

New York Poems
(Syracuse University Press, 2005)

Spanning roughly the past 30 years, New York Poems revisits and brings to life the vanished and still-vanishing New York of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Patches of Light
(2007)

Forthcoming in 2007.

Bilingual chapbook translated in Russian, translated by Aleksey Dayen.

Comments and Reviews