Lynn Melnick was born in Indianapolis and grew up in Los Angeles. Her poetry has appeared in BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in Opium and Forklift, Ohio, and she has written essays and book reviews for Boston Review, Coldfront, and LA Review of Books, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.
"On the melancholy-go-round of these poems, there's a swan-seat for sadness but also a tiger called Beauty and a horse called Hope. The unexpected music and syntax of Melnick's work will make you want to ride/read it again and again."
—Matthea Harvey
"Lynn Melnick's poems are a series of swift kicks knocking over whatever a lot of Boys think it's like to be a Girl. They're also the bruises afterward. If I Should Say I Have Hope teems with very small and much larger devastations, crackling throughout with fierceness and stealth and wry intelligence. 'There's some kind of crazy on the way,' she says. Those of us who've seen that crazy coming need this book. Those of us who haven't need it more."
—Mark Bibbins
YesYes Books
