iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Huge thanks to the good people @thimblelitmag.bsky.social for publishing my poem “Placeholder” in their beautiful fall issue. Such a pleasure to work with them, and to see the work in print. www.thimblelitmag.com/2026/07/25/p...

thimblelitmag.com

Placeholder

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

New book alert: Welcome Calm, Silence Tyrants by Melanie Weldon-Soiset, a deep-thinking and open-hearted poet I’m lucky to call a friend. Lots of scholarship behind this unique book. A healing read.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

#sealeychallenge day 31, last day: Incarnadine by Mary Szybist. “I had the happy idea to create a void in myself. / Then to call it natural. Then to call it supernatural.”

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 30: Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith. Haven’t read this since it came out in 2011 but picked it off the shelf today just when I needed it. A book of such imagination and contemplation, it creates a space past grief. On and on. Expanding. Bowie still glittering.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

#sealeychallenge Day 29: Nightshade by Andrea Cohen. To write with such brevity and see so sharply in the dark… A signed copy I found secondhand, inscribed “with hope for our poems.”

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 28: At Blackwater Pond by Mary Oliver. I’ve never read a book of hers, but being once again in the car on the last leg of a trip to stunning Nova Scotia, it felt like the right time. Vibing with her deep reverence and sense of the spiritual in the natural world.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 27: Eve by Annie Finch. A debut full of sophisticated formalism. Eve not as sinner but as mother, in the lineage of powerful goddesses. Like all women.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 26: Of Tyrant by Leah Umansky. “It is good to be alive under the tyrant, / for he highlights how we should love, / how we can make our own rules / how to remember that life can still surprise us / if we open ourselves to risk / if we oyster our way out of hate”

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 25: A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib. Glad again to be in the car for this one, because the poems are so skillfully paced. Repetition used to great effect too, not least the repetition of grief and violence. “Who died and made you?”

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 24 Covet by Lynnell Edwards, another fine poet and generous @spaldingwriting.bsky.social teacher. Coloring the many shades of desire, with humor and grace. Full of fascinating object poems, a form I think is difficult to pull off.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 23: So to Speak by Terrance Hayes. Picked this up at his @poetshouse.bsky.social reading this summer. In the company of greatness then and now. “You are not you for long. / I am not trying to change the world, / I am trying to change myself so that the world will seem changed.”

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 22: The Lights by Ben Lerner, probably one of the first collections to come after the pandemic. So evocative of that time in New York, so rich in ideas and elements of craft. The ars poetica alone, wow. Already in the re-read pile.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 21: One With Others by C.D. Wright, a vivid remembrance of a mentor set amid the unrelenting racism of 20th century Arkansas. Incredible multilayered storytelling, pacing, and tension. A book that fills a huge knowledge gap for me about this country and one I’ll never forget.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 20: All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman. Exuberance, juicy wordiness, and a vivid sense of place. Inspired by reading the Brothers Dickman, I will now go consider how the work of my (imaginary) poet twin would complement my own.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 19: The End of the West by Michael Dickman. Holding unbearable loss in its spare meditations. Picked up a used copy of this debut and his twin brother Matthew’s, at the aptly named Old Books in Hudson, NY. Intrigued to read the two back to back.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 18: Seed Across Snow by @kathdriskell.bsky.social, page-turning stories, intimacy and unflinching honesty. An earlier collection from the current Kentucky poet laureate and head of my fabulous graduate program @spaldingwriting.bsky.social

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 17: Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea by Nikki Giovanni, a book full of praise and seeing the best in each other as antidote for the worst. A gift from a friend, read in that spirit.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 16: Simplicity by Ruth Stone, a stunning book published a year before I became her student at Binghamton. I was so in awe of her and so afraid to be vulnerable then, I couldn’t engage. 30 years later, all I feel is gratitude next to her genius.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 15: The Pupil by W.S. Merwin. No poet pulls me out of my own fearful head quite like Merwin. The way he gestures to what’s beyond us and what’s beyond words. A continuum of darkness and light, and no thing ever truly gone.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 14: An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo. I had no idea how magical her speaking voice was when I chose audio again. A testament to the “relentless exile” of Native Americans and the generations of “lost poetry” we are all the poorer for. My god, what we’ve ignored or forgotten…

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

#sealeychallenge Day 13 Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminksy, read alone in the quiet of a library… “in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, / our great country of money, we (forgive us) / lived happily during the war.”

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

#sealeychallenge Day 12: Olio by Tyehimba Jess. Traveling tonight so had to switch it up, and lucky I did. A book propelled by its gorgeous sounds performed live at Carnegie Hall. True stories of the first generation of black musicians post-Emancipation in a venue befitting.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 11: Auction by Quan Barry: “we are all the chosen, the universe looked deep / within its Unknowableness and we rose like cream / into being and then promptly forgot / what we are to each other: kin.”

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 10: Trouble Funk by Douglas Manuel aka the literary homie. A soundtrack to his parents’ complicated love story and how it fits into the bigger picture of race and politics in the 70s and 80s. Unforgettable, fully dimensional characters you root for every step of the way.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 9: Zounds! by Aleksander Zywicki. Spare language suffused with deep contemplation, close observation, and tenderness. A great poet, teacher, and human being—repping Jersey in style.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 8 Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts. The fear a person has to overcome to be this dazzlingly vulnerable… Also, I’m late to this realization, but 2019 must be one of the greatest years for modern poetry. Incredible timing considering the shared trauma we would face in 2020.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 7: Short Talks, Anne Carson’s first collection. Pen to paper is not how I picture Anne Carson making poems. More like sculpting them from rare-earth materials few ever see let alone touch, veined with deep silence.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 6: Hybrida by Tina Chang, put on my must-read list a while back by my teenage daughter. Fitting it came to me that way, considering what a testament this book is to the complexities of motherhood (among its many wonders).

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 5 Haiku of Basho. Inviting light into a heavy day. “Summer moon — clapping hands, I herald dawn.”

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 4: Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. I used to collect @citylightsbooks.bsky.social Pocket Poet books as a teenager. One book a week when I got my paycheck from my job at The Gap. But had been missing Frank till now. Mid-century music and name-drops, and still fresh as a daisy.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 3: patient. by @bettinajudd.bsky.social An intellectual and visceral exploration of how Black women’s bodies have been dehumanized in the name of science. A study in how to promote empathy. Thank you @blacklawrence.bsky.social for keeping this book front and center.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

#sealeychallenge day 2: Pig by @samsax.bsky.social Sharp in every sense of the word. Unbounded creativity in constraint. Now pigs will always mean more to me. Now truffle will always be “faux genitalia pulsing oily in the earth.”

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

#SealeyChallenge day 1: Luminescence in Season by @colleenalles.bsky.social A master class in lineation and sticking the landings, and gorgeous all around.

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

So grateful to Twin Bird Review for publishing my poems, “Copenhagen, call of the void” and “I Sing the Belly Electric” in the beautiful summer issue!

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Melissa Shepherd @melissashepherd.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Thank you to #LittleCityBooks for hosting a great poetry discussion this week. So grateful to have been in conversation with two fine NJ poets, Ann E. Wallace and Catalina Florina Florescu, and to hear them read from their latest collections. #Hoboken #Poetry

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