Calanthe Press (2026)
Reviewed by Melissa Ashley for StylusLit
Boston-born Nicole Melanson has been receiving accolades and publishing her poetry in Australia and overseas for more than a decade. Now based in Brisbane, Sirens (Calanthe Press, 2026) is her long-anticipated first collection. Girls and women’s questioning of cultural expectations surrounding gender roles are a major theme of the collection, explored through topics as wide-ranging as pointillism, symbolist poetry, classical music, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Old Testament, and Grimms’ fairytales. Although many poems are written in the first and second person, their speakers and subjects are not always poet and reader, but rather protagonist and antagonist, their characters taken from contemporary events, fables and literature.
The wisdom of the imperative to protect and keep hidden certain uniquely female experiences is the subject of several poems. For example, in ‘What Happens to Our Stories,’ a language of the body is used to explore culturally imposed taboos and gender-related secrets, ‘we button them down/in something heavy […] something that doesn’t leak’ (18). Similarly, in the poem, ‘The Surface’, images from Greek mythology ‘young girls turning into trees,’ are deployed to explore the speaker’s relationship to her body following her first menstruation. The awareness of an irrevocable change to her female self gradually dawns, a kind of severing which will necessitate the restitching of her embodied identity, ‘I am a vein, / shot through with skin’ (10).
In the poem, The Shooter, the speaker becomes the voice of a teen killer’s female victims: mother, librarian, nurse, schoolgirls. The refrain, ‘Do you still blame us?’ petitions not only the shooter, who left behind an incel’s manifesto, but the attitudes of the broader culture that enable misogyny and male entitlement. The poem Three Sarahs offers a new take on the Salem witch trials, another cultural instance of female scapegoating in which independent women become a source of fear and mistrust. The speaker, identifying as one of the accused ‘witches’, describes making an apple pie from her own orchard, inhaling its steam ‘like a drug’ (48). Her crime, she confesses, for which ‘they’ll murder you,’ is that she loves her land, loves being financially independent.
The poem Collection explores the topic of organised religion; the girl speaker describes rituals of luxury associated with church, the lace and ribbons of her Sunday dress, the velvet-cushioned pews, which emphasise values connected with wealth ‘purses crack their jaws / in chorus,’ more so than charity or brotherhood, ‘Ushers pace the back of the church, wolves / in a mahogany pen’ (8). Indeed, meaning in Melanson’s poems often works in the gaps, in what is not said, reminiscent of devices used in haiku. An image is laid down in one line, only to be upended in the next, its final meaning reverberating long after the last word is spoken. In the poem ‘Limbo’, for instance, the speaker claims that ‘some nights / I hear my own house / turning against me’ (51), the nights and the hearing and the turning evoking locks and keys, as well as insomnia.
The myth of the seal woman whose husband hides her skin, preventing her from returning to her oceanic home is beautifully explored in the poem Selkies. A selkie visits a ‘little girl,’ sharing her experiences and imparting her with wisdom for the future. If the selkie represents wildness and freedom, she is also troubled by human vulnerabilities, ‘Sometimes, I stand at the edge / of disappearing.’ Conversely, there is a little selkie wildness in the girl, ‘Already you know / there’s a skin / at the end of your bed,’ suggesting the possibility of freedom. The girl is given instructions, rather than be dependent upon the skin – and vulnerable to someone stealing it – she can learn to swim, indeed, she must learn to swim (5).
Like the echoing Sirens of the titular poem, Melanson sings to life the experiences and imaginations of the underdeveloped, and therefore ripe for exploration, female characters of legend, myth and fairy tales. In ‘Helen’s Handmaid’, attention is returned to the woman said to have incited the Trojan war; she is reframed as ‘the whole damn figurehead, // bare-breasted, / smashing the surf / with her chest’ (65). I can almost taste the salt; see the froth, the foam, the powerful cutting of the ship through the ocean. In poem after poem, Melanson delights the reader with her original and reimagined tales of wonder and warning, like a fairy tale heroine, strewing rubies and emeralds with every step.