Poetry that is raw like reading directly into the author’s soul. You will feel every emotion through every word and every line. This is poetry for the queer and those who never feel seen. The power is in the way Crowe utilizes traditional poetry to really expand on what it means to feel. Their words express a desire to be seen in a world that lets you live truly free.
In this collection is a poem for everyone. In some way these words will make you deeply resonate with belonging. An emotional rollercoaster in the form of sonnets, prose, and rhymes. All opinions are my own. Thank you Melissa Crowe, University of Pittsburgh Press, and Netgalley for this advanced digital copy.
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A collection of poems which crash against bony girlhood and through adulthood, and fight against the tongue when read aloud. These poems are in love with language, say gloaming, say allele, say glimmer. Reinvent the apple, falling in pre- and post-lapsarian poetics. The medical collides with the internality of language. "Do I get to say /when it's over. Brother, I'm scared. I'll try." And across these poems, Crowe speaks to other poets, an interconnected echo of language returning and working over its subject.
Thank you to NetGalley for my digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is the kind of poetry collection that feels lived in—weathered by longing, sharpened by memory, and lit from within by hard-won self-knowledge.

What makes Abider so striking is its emotional honesty. These poems do not posture. They ache, confess, remember, desire, grieve, and reach—sometimes all at once. There’s a rawness here that feels intimate without ever losing its craft, as though each line has been carefully forged from something deeply personal and fiercely true.

At its heart, this is a meditation on what it means to remain—within love, within history, within hurt, within the complicated architecture of selfhood. That idea of “abiding” becomes beautifully layered: devotion and burden, tenderness and trap, endurance and ultimately liberation. The tension between wanting connection and needing freedom pulses through the collection, giving it a restless, beating heart.

What lingers is the voice—lush, searching, and wonderfully precise. Crowe’s language feels tactile and musical, rich with image and sensation, yet grounded in emotional clarity. There’s wildness here, but also discipline; vulnerability, but also power.

And threaded throughout is a deeply moving journey toward queer self-recognition—not framed as a neat awakening, but as something far more honest: complicated, painful, ecstatic, and transformative. The poems understand that becoming oneself often means grieving who you were taught to be.

Tender, fierce, and gorgeously rendered, Abider is a collection about survival, longing, and the radical act of choosing yourself—not once, but again and again. It leaves behind that rare feeling the best poetry does: that something inside you has been named more clearly than you could have named it yourself.

"But this morning / in the wet grass I saw rotting / windfall pears clustered with bees / who, vibrating, seemed both / ravenous and surprised by their luck." (87*)

Meditative and lush, full of wanting and requited and unrequited yearning, people who fit just right at exactly the wrong time and those who used to fit and no longer do.

I like having to work for poetry (me with my prose-laden, non-poet brain), and work for this collection I did. I read this slowly, a poem here, a few poems there, to allow each page time to percolate. Lots of layers here, lessons learned and unlearned, a balance of learning where the writer belongs and knowing that there are so many possibilities, but they can't all be true at once.

"I'm not so wild anymore. / Even untutored, I learned how a woman's / meant to temper her hungers, cross her legs // and shut her mouth. But I taught myself to feel / good. Can't unlearn." (18)

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

I generally dont dabble much in poetry but this premise just seemed soooo intriguing that I requested for an arc and I was lucky enough to receive one on Netgalley!

This book is so incredibly powerful and I feel like no matter what kind of childhood you have had, there are certain parts that every queer woman can relate to. I will try to keep this as spoiler free as possible, but there were parts that I felt right to my soul, especially when the author spoke about their childhood and the boy-related pressure that comes with it. I thoroughly enjoyed this piece and I'm going to now look into the author's other stuff because I am an absolute sucker for strong sapphic women!!

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Pittsburgh Press for providing me with an ARC of Abider in exchange for an honest review.

I do not read poetry very often.
That feels like an important thing to say at the beginning because whenever I read a poetry collection, I always feel slightly out of my depth. I am not someone who can easily discuss meter or form or trace literary lineages with confidence. I am, first and foremost, a reader who responds to feeling. I know when a poem leaves me cold and I know when one manages to slip past all my defenses and settle somewhere uncomfortable and permanent inside me.

Abider did the latter.

Melissa Crowe returns again and again to the idea of staying. Staying in places that hurt. Staying loyal to versions of yourself that no longer fit. Staying attached to people long after love has transformed into something else entirely. The title itself becomes the collection’s beating heart. To abide can be an act of devotion, but it can also be a wound. It can be tenderness, self-erasure, and even survival. I think what makes Abider so compelling is that it understands all of those truths simultaneously.

This is, in many ways, a story of queer self-discovery but I appreciated that Crowe does not present that journey as a neat, triumphant revelation. There is no clean line from confusion to certainty. Instead, the collection feels deeply interested in the messiness of becoming. The speaker moves through rural girlhood, marriage, desire, grief, memory and self-recognition carrying all of her previous selves alongside her. Nothing is discarded or simplified. The child, the wife, the lover, the queer woman, the survivor all remain present, speaking to and through one another.

Crowe consistently resists easy narratives. The past is neither romanticized nor condemned. Love is neither salvation nor destruction. Desire is neither wholly liberating nor wholly painful. Everything exists in contradiction.

As a queer woman myself, there were moments that hit especially hard. The collection captures the strange and often painful process of realizing that the life you have built may not actually be capable of holding who you are becoming. There are poems here that wrestle with compulsory heterosexuality, with longing, with wanting things you have been taught not to want, with trying to make peace with versions of yourself that survived by following rules you no longer believe in.

What I appreciated most was the lack of judgment. The speaker does not seem interested in condemning her former self. Instead, there is a tenderness toward past mistakes, past desires and past misunderstandings. Even when looking back on relationships that no longer serve her, the poems often feel reflective rather than bitter. There is heartbreak here, certainly, but also compassion.

The language itself is beautiful without feeling inaccessible. One thing that often intimidates me about poetry is the fear that I am missing something essential, that everyone else understands the poem while I stand outside looking in. I never felt that way with Abider. The collection is certainly literary and carefully crafted but its emotional core remains remarkably clear. The poems are rich with imagery and layered meaning, yet they never lose sight of feeling. Even when I did not fully grasp every reference or formal choice, I always understood what the poem wanted me to feel. And I felt a lot.

If I have one reason for settling on four stars rather than five, it is simply that poetry is such a personal experience. There were sections that resonated deeply and sections that felt more distant from me. Some poems lodged themselves in my memory immediately while others washed over me without leaving the same impression. That is not a flaw in the collection so much as the nature of poetry itself. Different readers will connect with different pieces. But even in the moments that did not fully land for me, I could still recognize the craftsmanship at work.

Ultimately, I think Abider is a collection about learning to choose yourself after years of choosing everyone else. It is about desire and grief, girlhood and womanhood, queer awakening and survival, but more than anything, it is about the difficult act of remaining faithful to your own becoming. By the end, Crowe arrives not at certainty or closure, but at something quieter and, I think, far more profound: the understanding that healing does not always mean moving on. Sometimes it means turning toward yourself with the same devotion you once reserved for other people. Sometimes it means deciding that your own life, your own joy, and your own truth are worth staying for. There is something deeply moving about that. Not because it promises healing or certainty, but because it offers something more honest: the decision to remain, to keep choosing yourself, and to finally become the place where your own love is allowed to stay.