Poetry. Melissa Buzzeo's WHAT BEGAN US is a story of portraiture, a philosophy of the book, and the retrieval of a fifteen-year-old girl from the ruins of an unnamed (unnameable) event. This unsettling work builds out of the debris of fractionated memory and broken gestures toward an illuminated structure, a thought project well worth the time it will take to know it.

"WHAT BEGAN US is an agitated, activated lyric that incants to a changing, pulsating beloved. What or who this beloved is goes beautifully unnamed. This is a new take on that very old form of the lyric. In its newness it is something shimmering and fully complicated."—Juliana Spahr

Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA

Born in 1977 in New York, Melissa Buzzeo has worked as a counselor, curator, professor and palm reader. She is the author of the full-length collections WHAT BEGAN US (2007, Leon Works) and FACE (2009, Book Thug). In addition she is the author of three chapbooks: In the Garden of The Book, City M. and Near: a luminescence.