UT academic advisor releases book of poetry

Melanie Dusseau, an academic advisor at the University of Toledo, released her first full-length book of poetry in 2009 titled "The Body Tries Again."

Dusseau, a Toledo-born writer, structured much of her poetry after the idea of home and place. She divided her 49-poem book into four sections.

"There's a few different themes throughout," Dusseau said. "The Midwest and poetry of place and the Toledo area. The second is popular culture, the third, sort of a mock argument between the brain and the body and tying into the title of the book, and the fourth being science and evolution related."

Each section closes with a poem about the persona of Darwin.

"The poems themselves are an evolution of each other," Dusseau said.

Dusseau received her undergraduate degree from Ohio University and proceeded to study English during her graduate degree at UT.

"I've always been interested in poetry, but I really started writing for myself during a workshop class at UT," Dusseau said. "I truly began investing myself into writing after taking the classes with the professors here." Dusseau went on to explain how UT helped to teach her about the importance of publication and how to proceed down such avenues. "I started with just sending out individual poems to various publications."

After her masters at UT, Dusseau received her Master of Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University. At SIU, Dusseau worked exclusively on her poetry and refined her craft to a collection of poems, which functioned also as her master's thesis. After she graduated from SIU in 2003, Dusseau returned to Toledo and began sending out her manuscript for publication.

WordPress, an imprint of WordTech, picked up her work in 2007. WordTech, a publisher that publishes only poetry, released Dusseau's book in 2009.

"It's a long process," Dusseau said.

Dusseau pointed to Charles Simic, Kim Addonizio and James Tate as being some of her favorite contemporary writers.

"My attraction to poetry is the image-driven descriptive language used, like an excuse to use highly concentrated language," said Dusseau. She went on to say that she had a teacher who once called writing poetry being "word drunk."

"But poetry can also be very simple and bare. There's so much depth as far as varying styles," she said. "Poetry can be about anything—funny, wild, sad and surreal."

As part of the 100th anniversary celebration of the College of Arts and Sciences, UT's English department will be hosting a reading on Feb. 25 at 3 p.m. in the Canaday Center in Carlson Library. Dusseau will be reading from her debut collection for the event. Since the release of "The Body Tries Again," Dusseau has done another reading this month at the College of DuPage near Chicago.

"A writer really has to be self-promotional," she said. "You have to be willing to travel around and do readings."

Dusseau's poems have appeared in Black Warrior review, River Styx and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has already received great acclaim from various fellow poets. American poet Denise Duhamel said of her work, "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 Body Tries Again' are enchantingly raucous."

–Melanie Dusseau will be reading from her book of poems, "The Body Tries Again" Thursday at the Canaday Center, 5th floor, Carlson Library at 3 pm.