The Rumpus Reviews Lynn Melnick's Landscape with Sex and Violence

Lynn Melnick’s 2017 book, Landscape with Sex and Violence (YesYes Books) is reviewed by Risa Denenberg for The Rumpus. "In the various landscapes which both frame and intensify these poems, Melnick offers us a portrait in which each poem is wholly conscious of belonging to its landscape," writes Denenberg. "Melnick’s speaker is aware of everything at once in her surroundings—she is hypervigilant—while at the same time forcing us to comprehend how easy it is to lose control of our choices while the world happens around us."  More:

...These poems simultaneously offer an uncomfortably close view and a dizzyingly wide-angle view of desperate landscapes. Melnick aptly describes these landscapes in “Green and Golden” as “(tarmac, blacktop, lonesome).” This is the world not of the less powerful, but of the powerless.

The preface poem, “Landscape with Stucco and Dandelion,” lays out the territory we are entering and solemnly warns us that these poems are confessions. This is not to say I read them as factual; that is beyond what a reader can know. I did read them as emblematic. The honesty is palpable in the text—the mixture of vulnerability, truth, and incredulousness found in these bleak places is rendered nearly voiceless with the simple phrase “no one stepped in,” when the speaker says she “let the riffraff envenom my body.” And there is a point, after reading the first few poems, when Melnick’s speaker asks, even begs, the reader to reconsider whether we really want to visit this landscape with her. After all, she points out in “Landscape with Twelve Steps and Prop Flora,” “I didn’t emerge well-trained into this savage vista,” and so,

you don’t want to believe

what I’m about to tell you

Melnick is far from welcoming. Indeed, in “Landscape with Smut and Pavement” she pushes us to the position of outsider looking in, forcing us to consider the line of separation between the experiences recounted in the poem and “the kind of architecture / that bodies who have been treated gently like to enjoy.” But if you make it to page fourteen, to “Landscape with Greyhound and Greasewood”, she insists that you get it or get out...

Read the full review here.