“Melissa Crowe is a new kind of genius of sensory memory. Mina Loy–like, Sappho-seeming, as if those ancient fragments blossomed so many centuries later as lush nerve endings signaling desire, signaling help for the crushed blooms of a childhood betrayed, in a cycle of agonizing poems the book’s other sections surround as if holding, carefully, even joyfully. Lo is a love song with a haunting melody that thrills me and makes me weep with gratitude. With wonder at the beauty she creates. With anger. The power of this voice is unstoppable.”

—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

“No one writes like Melissa Crowe, whose second collection, Lo, rides the exclamation and imperative of its title with indefatigable tenderness and dogged reverie and confirms Crowe’s place as one of contemporary poetry’s most skilled raconteurs. Like all great poets, Crowe knows attention is a kind of love, and her work resonates with the easy hum of concentrated care; what’s rare, then, is how these finely spun poems carry us through the sweet and the bitter, reviving a buried bravery both necessary and all our own. How many poets writing today can push us into the deep end of both fear and desire without ever letting go of our hand? We couldn’t have known then, given its brilliance, but it’s clear now: that first collection? Melissa Crowe was just warming up.”

—Meg Day, author, Last Psalm at Sea Level

“Lo is a devastatingly gorgeous, sigh-out-loud-every-other-line celebration of the inner life. Like a geode, an ordinary looking rock, ‘that opened onto secret glowing facets . . . so you knew/ a thing like this could look less blessed than it was,’ Lo insists that there is more—more to discover inside or underneath, more in the secreted and unsaid. In these poems, Crowe cracks open the ordinary, the harrowing, even the ugly, to reveal the jewels inside. This book—this poet—is a marvel.”

—Maggie Smith, author, Goldenrod