Melanie Janisse-Barlow's second book of poetry, Thicket, is a treatise on risk and the uncertainties of language in the modern world. In poems that gather and collect force page after page, Thicket negotiates humankind's overwhelming desire to communicate, and the discomfort that comes with the process of entanglement/disentanglement. When Janisse-Barlow writes of a “thousand awkward conversations,” she's working away at the knots of language, unraveling and recombining the threads to create self-styled lyric essays. Thicket is a linguistic tour de force.

Melanie Janisse-Barlow is a poet and artist. Her first collection of poetry, Orioles in the Oranges (Guernica, 2009), was listed for the Relit Award, and her essay poems, entitled Detroit, were listed in Best American Essays in 2013. Between a busy private commission schedule and the execution of larger projects such as the Ship of Fools Project (a painting installation on a sailboat), Guided (an installation in an abandoned apartment) and the Poets Series, Janisse works full time as a painter and installation artist in her hometown of Windsor, Ontario, and is completing her second poetry manuscript, Thicket. 26 Canadian Poets, which stems from her Poets Series project, is forthcoming from BookThug in the fall of 2016.

Melanie Janisse-Barlow's profile page