Poetry. In Todd Melicker's remarkable debut collection, RENDEZVOUS, the reader finds lines that join, converse, and split apart so completely that at times they literally flip, becoming distorted reflections of their own initial utterance. These are poems troubled by adoration and desire, evolution, and the spiraling of the mind immersed in measurement and inquiry. In quick succession we move from the differences between "more sun" and "same sun" to the abundance of the "floodworld/worried" and the strict limitations of "these daily tasks." Melicker writes--of love, of meeting, of the sun's slow revolution, and of return--in ways that keep these poems circling through the reader's mind. "i'm coming aware of the whole, what" he discloses, and "that all parts/ belong."

"Todd Melicker's RENDEZVOUS shapes itself as a series of creation stories. In the process of forming and naming, he enacts intimacies that are at the heart of creation, for Melicker comprehends a tenderness not immediate to the rest of us, derived, as we are 'from the/given up/divine etcetera.' His deeper perception causes imagination and formal assurance (which suffuse this book) to fall away like 'seedship or boathusk' before 'the living arrival' of recognition. So we meet and so we are dispelled 'where the first half we believe/ & the second half believes us.'"--Elizabeth Robinson

"A rendezvous is typically between two people, in one case, say, between poet and listener, the poem and the one who has come so gratefully to read Todd Melicker's long awaited first book. A rendezvous is charged, full of potentiality and longing ... Like Creeley, Melicker is a poet of rooms, of domesticity and day. In Melicker's rooms there is great disharmony, so harmoniously clustered. When we wake in these rooms, we can ask, just what is day? What is the lyric? In the rendez