Melanie Dusseau received a BA from Ohio University, an MA from The University of Toledo, and an MFA from Southern Illinois University, Cardondale. Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, River Styx, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other journals. This is her first collection of poems.

Other poems by Melanie Dusseau in Verse Daily:
June 30, 2004:  "Darwin Enters the City of His Birth" "The sleeping sickness came..."
July 11, 2003:  "Bestiary for the Breasts of a Starlet" "Once, / tucked under an armpit, / it squealed...."

Books by Melanie Dusseau:

Other poems on the web by Melanie Dusseau:
Four poems
Two poems

About The Body Tries Again:

"Melanie Dusseau’s poems lie down in the As-Seen-On-TV Store of the heart. I love this hilarious, frightening, and instructive book of the post-postlapsarian body as it continues its vertiginous descent and/or ascent to a next life in which dog angels play poker and the hip lunch spot is the Hard Rock Cafe, Purgatory."
—Angela Ball

"Dusseau belongs to the tradition of the poète maudit in that she loves to explode every form of spiritual pretense and societal stupor, but the truer character of her poetry comes of her affection: for science, for pop culture, for holding on to her rust belt roots, and to her individuality as a woman of her time. Think of her setting as a bowling alley, and her muse as Darwin. Dusseau is steel-tough, book-smart, and street-ready, and everywhere in The Body Tries Again, she carries a sense of uncompromising delight."
—Rodney Jones

"Melanie Dusseau’s The Body Tries Again is a tour de female force, a cunningly confrontational and irresistibly comic approach to the complications of gender. Borrowing from the language of pop culture, self-help, religion, and science, Melanie Dusseau generates images that sizzle with wit, intelligence, and sass. Inventive and beautifully crafted, the poems in the The Body Tries Again are enchantingly raucous."
—Denise Duhamel