Melissa Ho is a great poet, she is one of the few people who can do a poem that skirts the edges of many genres but still be very good. Her poem "Orange Acid and Other Admissions of Guilt"in Word Riot here is very college and Beat in tone, very simple and country and American, and yet it also mixes in much more meta moments that fit in--you almost never see this.
I am always against meta, but a few cases manage to succeed, and she is one. I love her opening, her lines and her ending--I love just that sense of what is Alaska to us, this huge white north of clear ice and snow and tree line, its purity and its meaning to us as an image:
1.
something i like.
the peppermint edges of your cheekbones, wedged like
silver coins. [...]
and cacti-pricked toes. i miss the black carbon
dust and the empty medicine cabinet. sidewalks
are not built of marble. [...]
5.
i want to peel off my skin and find alaska underneath.
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