Critical Commentary
“We come to poems as we come to nature, to witness transformation and to be transformed. The poems of Portrait Lands are the unmistakable work of a master of such transfiguration. Sprawling, delicate and shining like the architecture of a spider web, these lines cascade through grief into love, through love into wonder and back. Intimate as an echo, Portrait Lands' signature magic, with each page, begins, begins, and again.”
– Julian Randall, author of Refuse and The Dead Don't Need Reminding, winner of the Pushcart Prize
“Portrait Lands is a stunning act of emotional cartography—grief, memory, estrangement, and hope mapped across bodies, landscapes, and language. These poems speak from the disorientation of loss and the ache of not knowing where one belongs anymore when confronted with absence. What emerges from that hollow is a sensibility tuned toward the sacred, toward remembered and forgotten places, the connection between mother and daughter, earth and body, grief and love. Reading Portrait Lands feels like lying on sodden earth and hearing it hum back. It’s a book for anyone who’s ever tried to build a future out of memory or dared to keep loving through the unraveling.”
– Ally Eden, Fort Collins Poet Laureate 2022-2024
“In Melissa Mitchell’s Portrait Lands, landscapes and landforms meld into bodies, the search for self, and her place in the world. “I can’t slip into liquid sky —as much I would like to follow.” Her poems navigate love, loss, grief and the complex question on how to make human connections in our disconnected world. Her timeless poems shift like the Earth shifts. We land in her newly discovered world excited to read on and learn more as she connects the natural and human world in her uncanny and inventive poetry.”
– Kathleen Willard, author of The Next Noise is Our Hearts and Electric Grace, winner of the Marc Fischer Poetry Prize
“In Portrait Lands, Melissa Mitchell gives us a clear-sighted and inventive look at land and family. Mitchell’s poems demand a close reading and deep engagement to follow their levels of internal discovery. The poems in this collection transfigure the world, allowing the reader to experience landscapes haunted by keen interiority. These poems evoke a world of wonder, and through form and language, Mitchell turns her lens on the world around her. A beautiful and captivating collection of poems.”
– Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians, winner of the PEN Open Book Award
