Home - Melissa Sussens

Debut poetry collection, Slaughterhouse, out now from Karavan Press

About

Melissa Sussens (she/her) is a queer South African veterinarian, poet and editor. Her work has appeared in Kissing Dynamite, SFWP Quarterly and Isele Magazine, among many others. She has performed at the Poetry In McGregor festival, Off The Wall, The Commons and The Red Wheelbarrow where she also hosts weekly poetry readings. Melissa placed 2nd in the 2020 New Contrast National Poetry Prize and was selected for the Poetry for Human Rights anthology, Between the Silence, in 2021. A Best of the Net nominee, she also assists in teaching Megan Falley’s popular online writing workshop, Poems That Don’t Suck. By day she works as a small animal veterinarian and whenever she’s not doctoring animals, she can be found immersed in writing, editing, or reading poems. Melissa’s debut full length collection, Slaughterhouse, was published by Karavan Press in 2022. She lives Cape Town with her wife and their two dogs.

Book

“‘I watched death’ is the first line of Melissa Sussens’s debut collection. Never have I trusted a poet more to guide me by way of a book than I do Melissa – who has worked both in a veterinary clinic and a slaughterhouse. Fluent in the message that is at the core of art – we die – Sussens’s poetry is a relentless reminder in the utter thrill and sacredness of living. These poems find both the slaughter and the house, the home, in all the scenes of a life: from stalking an ex on Instagram, to coming out to your mother, to biting your nails, to girlhood, to loving in the face of bigotry. Of course this book will encourage readers to reckon with the humanity of animals, but what’s unexpected is the way it will help us acknowledge both the beast and the fawn, the Grim Reaper and the Angel of Death, within ourselves. Melissa brings her vocational history into these pieces at the line level – with lyricism oscillating between both brutal blade and gentle hand at once. I have never read any book like it.”
– Megan Falley, author of Drive Here and Devastate Me

“Blood animates and stains these remarkable poems, but Melissa Sussens asks us not to look away. Slaughterhouse is a hauntingly powerful debut. We get to see a poet grapple with ongoing legacies of vulnerability and violence, death and desire, all while experimenting cleverly with form. Some of these poems dripped off the page and stayed with me for days – I loved them.”
– Maneo Mohale, author of Everything is a Deathly Flower

“A brave, searing collection. Out of a difficult year of compulsory service at a slaughterhouse, Sussens has forged a plain–spoken, lyrical poetic voice able to ‘gut truth, / exhume the body of memory.’ Whether chronicling the forging of a queer sexual identity, the loss of innocence or its renewal through requited love and poetry itself, these unflinching poems refuse to be forgotten. In response to the inevitable risk of loving, she writes: ‘Sometimes I wish / I never knew the word merge …’ All the more poignant, then, that the collection should bear witness to precisely such points of fraught, perilous contact between self and world. A remarkable body of work that will sustain many rereadings.”
– Jacques Coetzee, author of An Illuminated Darkness