Regina O'Melveny is an artist and writer whose work has been widely published in literary magazines such as The Bellingham Review, The Sun, West Marin Review, and Barrow Street. Her poem, Fireflies, won the Conflux Press Poetry Award, released as an artist's book designed by Tania Baban. She has published three chapbooks, Secret, New and other gods which won a prize from the Munster International Literary Centre in Ireland. Full-length poetry books include Blue Wolves winner of the Bright Hill Press award and The Shape of Emptiness released by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her novel, The Book of Madness and Cures, published by Little, Brown and Company was listed as one of the six best historical novels of the year 2012 by NPR. Her novel The Sea-Cure is forthcoming in 2024 from Running Wild Press.

Other poems on the web by Regina O'Melveny:
Four poems

Regina O'Melveny's Website.

About The Shape of Emptiness:

"With an eye that misses nothing, but reveres everything it finds without turning aside, Regina O'Melveny's newest book offers us a poetry that sings our all-too-palpable common mystery, where each thing given, shapes the emptiness of its beginning and its end. The naming of things as they truly are combines with the music in these poems to score what it feels like to walk this blessed earth as a wise and sometimes grieving companion who has the rare capacity to express in all circumstances what weds us to this world: the need and desire to love."
—Peter Levitt

"The intense, compelling poems in The Shape of Emptiness by Regina O'Melveny, carry the reader through a cycle of sorrow to joy, death to life. The lyrical journey begins as the poet faces her feelings of loss and abandonment when her father leaves the family and later dies, still estranged from his daughters. A separation which dissolves all the history laid down in layers. But the poet finds improbable ways we all hold together. For her, the natural world, as carefully and eloquently described by her as it would be by a scientist, becomes her refuge, becomes how she holds together through her father's death and her mother's mental illness. All winter long the white roots/will spread and finger the way. In the final section of the book, she finds her "Lantern of Air" in the creation of her own family, thus closing the circle in the joy of deep connection with her husband and her daughter. My ear to his chest/clenched heart unclenches."
—Grace Grafton

"The language of these poems, creeps so close to the natural world it gets entangled in it and soon we are also submerged in harsh truth and ultimate beauty. Here, in the Shape of Emptiness, life crackles and death comes alive. This book is true medicine. Drink deeply. Take it in. Yes."
—Deena Metzger