Coming in March 2026!

Winner of the 2025 Vanderbilt Literary Prize, chosen by Major Jackson

“Melissa Range’s Printer’s Fist flies squarely in the face of exclusionary American history to counter efforts to privilege a particular perspective. Part of the play and, ironically, joy of this book is the way Range uses the archive as poetic form. This is probably what I find most astonishing about this collection, that while it remains fervently committed to its ethical assertions, the play of this poet’s mind across its subject matter points us toward further discovery and reflection.”
—Gregory Pardlo, Vanderbilt University Literary Prize jurist

You can pre-order Printer’s Fist from Vanderbilt University Press!

Scriptorium (Beacon Press, 2016)

A 2015 National Poetry Series selection, chosen by Tracy K. Smith

Praise for Scriptorium:

“What may likely strike you on the first read is Range’s remarkable facility with form. She moves nimbly, naturally, with comfort and acrobatic delight through the rigors of sonnets, villanelles, anagrams, cento and the like. She submits joyfully to the whims of rhyme, allowing music to exert its will upon her train of mind, and she does so with such virtuosic ease that you may not even detect it on a first read.  But what you will feel more than any of this, I am certain, is an urgent usefulness. These are poems for which form is not an end in itself.”–Tracy K. Smith, from the foreword

“Poetry is ongoing revelation, the spirit surging in new words and shapes, in fresh forms.  Yet rarely have I had such a vivid sense of this as while reading Scriptorium. This is revelatory poetry of a high order.”–Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015

“Linguistically graceful and formally exquisite . . . Range’s poise shines throughout.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“If it were possible for Emily Dickinson to sing in a bluegrass band it might sound something like the poems in Scriptorium . . . There is a living density to this work, sacred and profane, archaic and now, rendered in lines that are rich with syllabic music and muscle.”–Barbara Roether, New York Journal of Books

You can purchase Scriptorium from Beacon Press, from your favorite independent bookstore, from Powell’s, and elsewhere on the internet.

Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010)

Winner of the 2010 Walt McDonald Prize, chosen by Robert Fink

Praise for Horse and Rider:

“It’s distressingly hard to find new American poets best served by traditional prosody, by terza rima or by couplet rhyme. Hard, but hardly impossible. Melissa Range is one such poet, and her immersion in traditions—religious and regional, as well as metrical—has led to an exciting, disturbing, promising . . . first book.”–Stephanie Burt, The Believer

You can purchase Horse and Rider from your favorite local bookshop, from Powell’s, and elsewhere on the internet.