Melissa Eleftherion, Suture

 

suture #201

a royal

mouth

 

a                      redemption
swan 

 

I
corrupt
the
soft
light

The latest full-length collection by Ukiah, California poet, librarian and visual artist Melissa Eleftherion [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], following a whole mound of chapbooks, as well as the full-length titles field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018) and Gutter Rainbows (Querencia Press, 2024)—with a further, Malocchia (White Stag, 2026), forthcoming later this year—is Suture (San Diego CA: Cooper Dillon Books, 2026). For some time now, akin to Birmingham, Alabama poet Jessica Smith, Eleftherion has been utilizing erasure as a formal means through reclamation and recombination, and Suture [which I should point out includes work from two of Eleftherion’s above/ground press chapbooks] articulates across a sequence of ‘healing points’ (as it were) via source texts including the late V.C. Andrews’ (1923-1986) classic novel Flowers in the Attic (1979). This is a novel, as Eleftherion writes as part of her “Essay on the Text” at the back of the collection, “[…] I (oddly) read and reread as a youth. The book was a beloved (yet deeply problematic) novel passed from friend to friend in hushed voices. Its premise unfolds the incestuous Dollanganger family saga, with the central story revolving around an uncle and niece who marry & have four children. When the uncle (father) suddenly dies in a car crash, the mother is left bankrupt & returns to her wealthy parent’s estate to get back in their good graces. The one caveat is that she must conceal evidence of her past marriage (her children) from the patriarch in order to earn back his trust & her inheritance.” Referencing how Andrews’ novels “provided some solace, and helped to validate my suspicions about those family members my gut told me to mistrust,” she continues:

            These erasure poems are from a series I’ve been working on about trauma. Erasure can be a useful form for processing trauma because it can help the writer externalize events that come up, while also building towards a catharsis. They can help one extirpate & shine a light in the dark.

Working through Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic as well as her novel My Sweet Audrina (1982), Eleftherion’s erasure poems read short, dense, clipped and precise. “I / applied / marriage / to / welts,” she writes, as part of “suture #28,” later writing: “asking / permission.” The poems write exacting moments of trauma and silence and refusing both, allowing a light to shine through the text in a way that nothing else may remain hidden. She employs erasure through a problematic and highly popular text to compose something exact, and spare—almost meditative—and yet, emblematic of the exact nature of the suture, working a stitch across a wound to form a scar. “Sunday           was / tired / faces,” she writes, as “suture #12,” “underneath / this          princess / dress / and / panic [.]”

suture #167

We call
to the wind
to love us
clea n